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A Dreamer in Paris 



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By William Jasper 
Author of *'Graystc 

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A Dreamer in Paris 

By WilKam Jasper Nicolls 
Author of "Graystone/'etc. 

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Illustrated by 
Frank H. Taylor 




Philadelphia 

George W. Jacobs & Co. 

Publishers 



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Two cioBies ^8ceHV8d 

OCT 1 1904 
Qosyilfht Entry 

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Copyright, 1904, 

By George W. Jacobs & Co. 

Published, September, igo4. 



Illustrations 



Avenue de I'Opera 


Frontispiece 


Avenue des Champs Elysees 


. Facing page 50 


Quartier Latin . . . 


" 98 


Le Palais de Justice . 


" 160 


La Porte Saint- Martin 


" 198 



V 



T^out homme a deux pays, 
le sietif et puis la France.'' 




A Dreamer in Paris 



F I should wait until my return to 
Annerica to write my impres- 
sions of Paris, I am certain that 
the rosy afterglow of memory 
would so envelop my understanding that the 
description would not convey a true mean- 
ing. It would be a view of life as one sees 
it through the beautifying atmosphere of a 
hazy, crimson sunset. It would be a picture 
in which the soft, blending colors of romance 
would obscure the harsh lines of realism. It 
would make even the sordid and mean ap- 
pear rich and harmonious. 

Here in Paris, face to face with the things 
and the people of my imagination, — here, in 
the very heart of the city, I can feel the 
witchery, the glamour, and the seductiveness 



lO 



A Dreamer in Paris 



of the crooked old streets. The echoes of 
the past come stealing into my hearing; my 
senses seem deadened to the present-day ob- 
jects, and I am forced to turn my mind's eye 
ever backward along the extended vista of a 




dim and uncertain past. And as one looks 
down a long avenue of trees, all planted at 
equal distances apart, and beholds those 
nearest to him to be in exact and symmet- 
rical proportions and the two lines gradually 
coming together as they lengthen, until 
finally they merge into one confused mass; 
so the views of Paris lie distinctly before 



A Dreamer in Paris 1 1 

me, but in the distance is a phantasmagoria 
filled with a multitudinous people. 



I see a motley crowd of knights in armor, 
cavorting across the scene, accompanied by 
gentle dames with soft white skins and dark 
lustrous eyes, — these from the Midi. I have 
always imagined that the fighting men of 
France came from the South. I can see the 
** Reds of the Midi" as they are entering 
Paris after their long march from Marseilles, 
and I wonder if they spared their own flesh 
and blood,— the dark-skinned knights and 
ladies who had preceded them, by many 
centuries. When I dream of the frightful 
guillotine, it seems to be the fairest and the 
most beautiful, the golden-haired and blue- 
eyed, that are the victims, — and these are 
from the North. 



Those wicked old streets! That labyrinth 
of narrow, dark, ill-ventilated thoroughfares, 



12 



A Dreamer in Paris 



where the gutters ran down the middle, and 
where flickering oil lamps were suspended 
on cords over the centre, what deviltry was 
committed in those days! 
And as the noblest and the best of men and 

women perished 
by the fury of Pa- 
risian mobs, so 
also the library of 
the Louvre, with 
its priceless con- 
tents, was reduced 
to ashes. 

The horrors of 
the Commune and 
the possibility of 
a recurrence of the same terror, scattered 
many of the wealthy to other cities where 
life and property were more secure. To-day 
they are back again in increased numbers. 
Like the dwellers in the pathway of volcanic 
streams they fall asleep, and what has been 
is forgotten. But a stranger in Paris finds 




A Dreamer in Paris 



13 



his memory full of plots and counterplots, 
of tales of horror mixed with those of love 
and intrigue, — and all of the olden time. 



^ 



Every garden of any size, or having any 
pretensions to age, is surrounded by tall 
spectral fences, 

through the ._.,^^^h^ 1 % 
panels of which 
I can see enor- 
mous trees. 
They seem to 
nod their stately 
heads in courtly 
response to 
the whispering 
winds. I often 
wonder what 
the rumor-laden breezes are telling them. A 
little while and again a little while and ** the 
people " will come like a whirlwind. The 
people. Who are the people ? I saw one of 




14 A Dreamer in Paris 

them to-day hitched to a cart. He was 
harnessed between shafts Hke a beast of 
burden. I have seen hundreds of ''the 
people " in the same condition. They are 
not permitted, like men, to use the sidewalks. 
They must walk in the streets with the 
animals. Not in the crooked, wicked old 
streets of the sixteenth century, but in the 
boulevards of Louis XIV, and in the broad 
and straight avenues of Napoleon III. 

Poor Jacques! When he takes off his 
harness at night, and unwraps the rags from 
his swollen and blistered feet, of what is he 
thinking ? 



^ 



There are two sides to every question. 
In Paris there is the side of the haughty and 
the intolerant, that can be viewed from the 
following: 

"'Paris rebellious?' replied the mar^- 
chal, bowing with his plumed hat beneath 
his arm. ' Your Majesty is pleased to jest. 



A Dreamer in Paris 



15 



I have surveyed the 
field. This mob! 
this shabby, scurvy 
mob! — what is it? 
A flea-bite, a mole- 
hill, a cobweb, a 
weed! 

'"What! does it 
alarm Your Majesty! 
It is a plaything, a 
pop-gun, a paper 
pellet. I have but 
to snap my finger 
and it vanishes!'" 

Then there is the 
other side, — the side 
of the hungry and 
starving, the un- 
thinking and the 
desperate, — the 
side of the so- 
called patriot: 

"The street 




i6 



A Dreamer in Paris 



of Saint Honore into which we turned, was 
wild with noise and confusion. Our two 
drums beat steadily. We sang the ' Marseil- 
laise' with all our lungs. The wheels of 

our gun-car- 
riages clanged 
on the pave- 
ment. Be- 
hind us the 
battalions of 
the Faubourg 
deGloirewere 
shouting the 
* (^a ira ' to 
the rattle of 
their fourteen 
drums. All together we went on through 
the quarter of the aristocrats like a furious 
torrent, like a mighty wind." 




I close the book, for it is now evening, and 
step around the corner into the Rue St. 



A Dreamer in Paris 



17 



Honore. It is quiet enough now. None but 
working men and women are seen, hurrying 
home to their dinners. Further down the 
street are large, fine-looking mansions, with 
enormous wooden 
doors. The carv- 
ings on these doors 
are said to represent 
a fortune. I know 
that their gardens 
can be seen from 
the rear, in the Rue 
de Rivoli. I listen 
at night until the 
last sighing breeze rustles the dark foliage of 
the gardens and then is lost in the dust of the 
Boulevard. 

In the morning, with less excited nerves, I 
can continue my book of the night before 
and I read as follows: 




''Now and then a high-up window would 
be opened and a shot fired down at us — but 



i8 



A Dreamer in Paris 



we laughed and marched on. * We can't 
stop for pop-gun work now,' cried long 
Samat, hoisting still higher his banner of the 
Rights of Man. * We'll attend to them to- 




morrow/ cried Margan. * Then they shall 
swallow the same sort of plum-stones that 
we'll give the tyrant to-night! ' 

*' As we drew closer to the castle the fire 
grew hotter. Shots kept popping out at us 
from cellar windows, from balconies, from 
the roofs. But nothing stopped us. On we 



A Dreamer in Paris 19 

marched, faster and faster,— roaring louder 
and louder the ' Marseillaise.' " 



The sombre cloud of unrest overhangs 
Paris. It is full of forked lightning. I 
never enter any of the old palaces on sight- 
seeing excursions, with any of the careless 
indifference which I notice in my com- 
panions. The grinning skull peers at me 
from every corner of the building, and I long 
to get away into the open. 

I can see the Reds of the Midi as they 
''entered the king's apartment, all hung with 
white and blue. ' See, that's his portrait up 
there!' said Margan — and in a moment he 
had snatched it off the wall and flung it on 
the floor. We joined hands and danced a 
farandole around it, each of us as we passed 
spitting on the tyrant's face, and all of us 
roaring out: 

' Danson la Carmagnole 
Vive le son du canon ! ' " 



20 



A Dreamer in Paris 



How can one enjoy the costly collections at 
Versailles and Fountainebleau, with the fol- 
lowing or similar lines ringing in one's 
memory ? 

" There all was gold and silk, and mirrors 
covering the walls to the very ceiling, and 
pictures to take your breath 
away, and curtains and 
laces, and carpets as soft as 
down. And all had a sweet 
delightful smell. Margan 
|- caught hold of the bed and 
dragged it into the middle 
of the room: and as he 
tumbled and rolled on it we took up our 
crazy round again and danced about him 
singing the worst thing we could think 
of: 




* Fai, fat, fai, te lou tegne blu, panturlo ! 
Fai, fai, fai, ie lou tegne blu /' " 



Besides the clouds of unrest are real clouds, 



A Dreamer in Paris 21 

of a dull leaden hue, which overhang Paris 
from November until April and the ceaseless 
dripping of rain during this season is most 
depressing. It is so wet and sloppy to-day 
that I cannot go out, and 1 must perforce 
finish my book: it is about the sans- 
culottes. 

** As we talked, we went into a great 
vaulted entrance-hall — filled with a shouting, 
yelling crowd — at the fore end of which 
went up a stairway to the floor above. Ex- 
cepting a few women, with their sleeves 
rolled up to their elbows like hucksters, all 
the people about us were sans- culottes ; 
and although they were armed in every 
sort of way — with swords and pikes and 
iron bars and even staves — they all were 
armed. 

** Every one was pushing toward the stair- 
way; and as we stood on tiptoe and looked 
over the heads of the crowd we saw that 
at the foot of the stairs was a little red table 
at which sat three sans-culottes, with red 



22 



A Dreamer in Paris 



caps on their heads looking as stern and se- 
rious as judges. A flickering candle stuck in 
a bottle stood on the table and lighted up the 
picture. 

"While we stood watching, there was a 
movement up in the shadows at the head of 

the stairs; and 
then down came 
an old priest. 
He was as pale 
as death, his 
hands were 
bound, and he 
was between 
two jailors who pushed and jostled him to 
make him go faster. As soon as he stood in 
front of the table at which sat the stern- 
looking judges, a sharp voice cried out: * He 
has refused to take the oath! ' And then the 
judges all together cried : * Death ! ' 

" On the instant, two or three iron bars 
struck him down. Pikes and swords were 
thrust into him. He was dead. And then 




A 'Dreamer in Paris 23 

two sans-culottes dragged out his body to 
throw it in the cart." 



I must have fallen asleep and dreamed a 
** night-mare," for the cold perspiration stands 
out on my forehead like beads, as with a 
shaky hand 1 reach out for the matches and 
relight the stump of a candle which stands 
on a night table at the head of my bed. 
Outside, the rain is still falling in silent, 
mournful drops, and I can hear the clang of 
a horse's feet as his sleepy driver urges 
him over the stones of the narrow Rue la 
Boetie. The miserable light from the candle 
is bad enough but I can read how "a young 
and beautiful lady was dragged down the 
stairs. She caught at the balusters, and 
when she was forced in front of the judges, 
she fell on her knees and her screams and 
prayers for mercy fairly broke my heart. 
Poor girl! I thought. Surely they won't dare 
to kill her. But in a moment three brutes of 



24 A Dreamer in Paris 

women, three furies, flung themselves upon 
her; and while two of them scratched gashes 
in her face the third dragged down the waist 
of her dress and bit and tore her tender 
breasts. Saving her from this torture, a 
sans-culotte ran her through with his 
sword." 

Thank God for the morning light! 

With much effort I force back the impres- 
sions of the night and try to understand the 
Paris of to-day. 



It is no easy task for an American, as 
there seems to be no common ground from 
which to start, no base line upon which to 
erect a parallel structure. My first impres- 
sions are uncertain and bewildering. Every- 
thing seems so absolutely different, so en- 
tirely unlike. My eyes refuse to transmit to 
the brain such an enormous mass of unusual 
detail. They becom.e strained and tired, 
while the congested mind makes feeble 



A Dreamer in Paris 25 

efforts to arrange and record all that one has 
seen. 

Homesickness soon follows as a natural 
consequence, together with a feeling of un- 
rest and irritability; often to such a degree 
that many Americans yield to the weakness 
and flee from Paris, carrying with them but 
a perplexing memory of undigested fancies 
and unfamiliar sights. These tourist impres- 
sions simply haunt the brain, but do not 
satisfy the understanding. Rest tranquil for 
awhile and the tired eyes grow stronger; the 
weary brain soon becomes active and eager 
to retain and classify the fascinating pictures 
that multiply on every side. 



The French language, which at first ap- 
pears to be a senseless jargon, becomes 
musical and in harmony with the surround- 
ings. I have listened night after night to the 
cry of a street newsman — for some reason 
there are no newsboys in Paris — calling, as I 



26 A Dreamer in Paris 

supposed, "The big flea! " at the top of his 
stout pair of lungs. It took me some weeks 
to harmonize this disquieting announcement 
with the common street cry: ''La Patrie! 
La Patrie I " which is the name of a well- 
known evening journal. 

The study of French 
and the love of it, is 
what first drew me to 
Paris, twenty years ago. 
In that time there have 
been many changes in 
this city and in myself, 
but I can recall the fact 
that I took the advice of those who should 
have known better, and came here with 
the idea of mastering the language in three 
weeks! I remember the dazed condition I 
was in at the end of the allotted period. 
I had mingled with the people; had taken 
lonely drives along unfrequented French 
highways, with a French companion; had 
learned the difference between la maison — 




A Dreamer in Paris 27 

house — and Varhre — tree — when they were 
pointed out to me, en route; and then I re- 
turned to America after having added to my 
French vocabulary a few words and phrases 
culled from a small conversation book. The 
French language cannot be "mastered" by 
an American in three weeks, in ten weeks, 
nor in ten years. In fact, I met a very 
intelligent gentleman the other evening, at a 
social gathering of ** exiled Americans," who 
has been living in Paris for fifteen years, and 
yet is unable to speak but a few simple words 
in French. Mere association with the people 
will enable one to learn their manners and 
customs, but not the French language. And 
still there are thousands of my countrymen 
who, ignoring a law as old as civilization, 
insist upon finding "the royal road." Their 
assurance reminds me of the man who was 
asked if he could play on the fiddle. "I 
have never tried," he replied, "but I know I 
can!" I write from bitter experience, and 
for a warning to all who follow the false 



28 A Dreamer in Paris 

teachers of the impossible. I have tried them 
all, and their "methods" and "systems" 
are but as snares to the unwary and as 
thorns in the side of the ambitious and the 
credulous. 



A worthy ambition also, and one full of 
joyful promise; for it has been said: "To 
possess two languages, is to have two souls." 
This thought spurred me on to renewed 
efforts, and, long after my return to America, 
I followed the short-cuts and the by-ways to 
the acquisition of French, with varying ex- 
periences. One of my friends suggested a 
very easy way to learn French. He was a 
man of large influence amongst financiers, 
and his name at the bottom of a check was 
good for any amount under seven figures. 
" You have only to buy a French paper," he 
said, "and read that every morning instead 
reading English." The papers accumulated in 
my library, neatly folded as when they came 



A Dreamer in Paris 



29 



to me, until the pile grew to an embarrassing 
size. I never got beyond the title, Journal 
des Debats, and then I "flunked" ignomin- 
iously. To this 
day I am positive 
that my friend's 
French vocabu- 
lary is limited to 
very few words. 
I should like to 
have my revenge 
on him; to hear 
him explain to 
the voluble Pa- 
risian blanchis- 
seuse that he had 
three white shirts 
in his washing list, instead of the skirts and 
flummery things that are in her basket! 




There was another "easy" way— a tor- 
menting system, the dregs of which hang in 
the wrinkles of my brain like the memory of 



30 A Dreamer in Paris 

some undigested horror. The victim simply 
repeated a sentence, in French, ten, fifteen, 
twenty, a hundred, times daily, until that 
sentence became so graven upon the secret 
recesses of the mind that he could think of 
nothing else. 

I tried it, and soon began to loathe myself. 
For weeks I had no peace of mind and felt 
like a jabbering idiot. I had such a surfeit of 
that one sentence, that my mind took on a 
severe mental derangement. 

I remember once, when I was a boy at 
school, my teacher caught me in the act of 
eating a raw turnip. 1 was nibbling it, con- 
tentedly, secure, as I thought, behind the up- 
lifted lid of my desk, when he descended on 
me. I had two very large, overgrown tur- 
nips, which he made me eat, standing up be- 
fore all my class-mates. The smell of a raw 
turnip makes me ill to this day. 

I was satiated with that ''foundation sen- 
tence" in much the same manner in which 
I had overfed on raw turnips. 



A Dreamer in Paris 



31 



I realize the fact that one can have too 
much of a good thing. 

One can acquire a very satisfactory knowl- 
edge of French and speak it more or less 
fluently by one 
method only. That 
is what 1 should 
call the ''sensible 
method." Begin at 
the bottom and 
work up, and not 
at the top and work 
down. That is, be- 
gin at the beginning. 
This method is easy but not rapid, and what- 
ever time is spent on it will bring more or 
less happiness. 

To be more specific, buy a French primer 
and learn the alphabet and the rules of pro- 
nunciation. Then buy a child's first reader, 
and afterwards a second, third and fourth 
reader, until finally some polite Frenchman 
will say, as one remarked to me the other 




32 A Dreamer in Paris 

day, " Monsieur, vous parley la langue 
Fratifatse comme Voltaire ! " 



It was exaggerated politeness, of course, 
but how far merely being polite will carry 
one in Paris, is astonishing. 

From the time of Louis XIV, who in- 
sisted upon the observance of politeness 
amongst his subjects, the custom is almost 
universal. From the highest to the lowest, 
it is the pass-word current everywhere in 
France. 

I was reading one day of '' an historical 
instance of a well-known aged nobleman, 
who, descending the stairway, meets a youth 
of twenty, mounting. The nobleman stops 
to let him go up, and the youth does the 
same, inviting the nobleman to pass down. 
The latter stands firm, and requests the 
youth to continue, who responds, 'Jamais!' 
with hand on heart,— he knows too well what 
youth owes to age, — upon which the elder 



A Dreamer in Paris 33 

commands him to mount; when the young 
man, with a bow, says, * Youth owes obe- 
dience to age,' and passes, — thus saving the 
situation." 

Here is another, which illustrates what is 
called in the vernacular, " a jolly." 

*' A street gamin opens a cab door to let a 
man out before a theatre. The latter asks 
him if the piece has begun yet. 

** * Pas encore, mon ambassadeur : on vous 
attend I ' was the ready reply, and the boy's 
equally ready hand closed over a merited 
franc." 

In a cynical mood I started one morning to 
test this characteristic to a limit which I 
thought would be absurd. 

At the foot of the stairs I raised my hat to 
the concierge and remarked that it was a fine 
day. The man's face was fairly illumined 
as he returned my salute, and hurried past 
to open the doors for my exit. '* Ah ! truly 
it is a fine day," he remarked, " and if Mon- 
sieur will turn to the left and walk two 



34 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

blocks, he will come to the Champs Elysees, 
where he will see many people, and enjoy 
such a fine promenade, that his health will 
be fully restored." It took three hon jours 
and four au revoirs before I could leave him, 
still bowing and talking. 
" But he knows me," I ungraciously mut- 
tered to myself; 
" I will try it on a 
stranger." 

At the corner, 
near the church St. 
Philippe du Roule, 
—a very busy cor- 
ner where two lines 
of tram-cars and 
two omnibus* routes intersect each other — I 
found an old man busily engaged roasting a 
huge pan of chestnuts over a charcoal fire. 
His hands were black and his face red from 
the efforts he was making, and he appeared 
too busy to notice any one in the crowd 
around him. To him I made my best bow 




A Dreamer in Paris 35 

and prefacing my question with ** Pardonei- 
moi, Monsieur," I inquired the way to Boule- 
vard Haussmann. Again I found the reply 
courteous. " If Monsieur desires to walk, it 
is but a short distance," he said, as he came 
from behind his little stall to show me the 
direction. Then, because I hesitated, he 
added encouragingly, " Or, if Monsieur pre- 
fers to ride, the tram-car just opposite will, 
for three sous, deposit him exactly at the 
corner." I looked over his shoulder and saw 
that his neglected chestnuts were burning. 
Here iis the supreme test, I thought, and, 
pretending that 1 misunderstood his direc- 
tions, I started in the wrong direction. In a 
moment he was at my side. '* Pardon, 
M'steu," and he touched his hat as he gently 
but firmly turned my face in the right 
way. 

I am convinced that his manners cost him 
a panful of chestnuts, more or less burned, 
but I have since then almost ruined my di- 
gestion by making liberal purchases of the 



36 A Dreamer in Paris 

mealy nuts from him, so that he counts me 
among his best customers. 

My promenade was not without its disa- 
greeable features. It is " out of season " for 
the butterfly Americans, who come here 
during July and August, and who flit around 
from cafe to cafe in their aimless endeavor 
to kill time. One meets very few of these 
idlers now. It is the month of October, and 
the outside of the cafes presents a sad and 
deserted appearance. The little round tables 
and chairs still stand in their accustomed 
places on the pavement, but the carefully 
swept sawdust under foot has a damp and 
chilling look, which no amount of Bene- 
dictine — taken internally— can efface. Here 
and there — like bluebottle flies buzzing 
around the outside of a warm window-pane 
— there are a few inveterate old red noses 
— in most cases, solitary individuals — sip- 
ping their weak sugar and rum decoctions, 



A Dreamer in Paris 37 

just outside of the warmer looking in- 
terior. 

These old fellows are not to be classed 
amongst the disagreeable features of a win- 
ter in Paris. 
They are merely 
dreamers, like 
myself, and al- 
though the air is 
raw and cold, and 
the fell destroyer, 
rheumatism, is 
creeping up their 
legs from the 
damp pavements, 
they refuse to be turned from their habits, 
or aroused from their reveries. 




^ 



The unalloyed misery of the Paris streets 
in winter is mud, from Lutum or Lutetia, the 
name by which Paris was first known. 
Where it comes from no one seems to know 



38 



A Dreamer in Paris 



but it is almost always present. I have 
walked in the streets of Paris under the 
brightest of skies, and in the clear moonlight, 




when the roadway and the pavements were 
covered with a pasty, sticky mud of an in- 
describable character. It may be fancy, but 
it seems to me that this compound exhales a 
peculiar sour smell, a faint memory of the 



A Dreamer in Paris 39 

odor which nearly a thousand years ago 
" rose above the house-tops and spread itself 
beyond the farthest environs." During that 
period when the narrow streets of Paris were 
still unpaved, **it was said that, on the dark- 
est night of the year, the traveler out of his 
course might know by the scent whether he 
were within a league or two leagues of Paris." 



Of course, it is not always muddy, nor is 
it always raining even in winter. One day 
in November we had the thermometer at four 
degrees centigrade, with a bright sun over- 
head and hard dry pavements under foot. 
It was delightfully bracing, and to an Amer- 
ican exactly the temperature conducive to 
physical exercise and mental exhilaration. 
But the poor Parisians simply curled up with 
"the terrible cold" and became dormant. 
*'// fait fr Old'' was the prevailing phrase 
and the few who braved exposure in the 
streets hurried past to places of refuge. One 



40 A Dreamer in Paris 

reason for this lies in the fact that the gener- 
ality of houses in Paris are not built to with- 
stand cold weather. 

We live in a house in the Rue la Boetie, the 
like of which can be found in every street in 
the city. It is built of brick and plaster — 
after the manner of our old-fashioned peb- 
ble-dashed houses — the plaster on the out- 
side being smooth and of a grayish, cement 
color. It is five stories in height, and fronts 
right on the street line. In the centre, on 
the ground floor is a wide main entrance 
flanked on both sides by small shops, occu- 
pying all of the street floor. Should one 
pass through this hallway, and open the 
door at the rear, one would see an en- 
closed courtyard surrounded by stables and 
carriage houses. These stables are full of 
horses, and the rear windows of our etage 
look out upon a noisy stable-yard, usually 
full of loud-talking hostlers, and more or 
less redolent with the odors arising from 
such places. 



A Dreamer in Paris 



41 



It is difficult to accustom oneself to living 
with a stable in the centre of the dwelling, 
but the houses in Paris are almost invariably 
built that way. 



On the right of the hallway is the room of 
the concierge, b. char- 
acter corresponding 
somewhat with the 
janitor in our city 
apartment houses. In 
a French house the 
concierge is supreme, 
and no one has the 
courage to question his 
authority, excepting, 
perhaps, his wife, who is always more in 
evidence. I have noticed whenever I have 
been in France, that the woman is always 
paramount. Under the guise of I'amour the 
Frenchmen worship and idolize, to the point 
of effeminancy, a pretty young woman; and 




42 A Dreamer in Paris 

when she grows old, they defer to her and 
obey her wishes. 

The powers of the coficierges are un- 
limited. They can make one's stay in Paris 
agreeable and pleasant, or extremely dis- 
agreeable, as it may please them. They can 
hold one's letters until hope deferred makes 
one homesick again, and they can tell one's 
friends, who vainly call, that " Monsieur is 
not in." They can do all this with a smiling 
face and a lying tongue. Or they can have 
the morning paper at one's door as regularly 
as the clock strikes nine; and at night the 
front door will open, on the mere touch of 
the bell, to admit one's shivering form, or 
one may be kept standing in the wintry 
blast with the doors closed and locked like 
the portals of the past. They can do more, 
for even though one may have gained ad- 
mittance and begun the weary climb of 
ninety-two steps to the fourth floor — 1 count 
them now, and darkness has no terror for 
me — they can turn on the lights of the stair- 



A Dreamer in Paris 



43 



case, and illumine the triumphal return to 
one's cozy fireside, or they can put them out 
at nine o'clock and make one creep up to bed 
like a thief. 



Our house is not heated by any central 
appliance, such as a furnace in the cellar, 




and when the thermometer begins to fall, the 
halls are colder than a refrigerator. 

Inside the front door of our apartments, 
however, the conditions are better. In the 
anti-chambre there is fixed in the wall, be- 



44 ^ 'Dreamer in Paris 

tween this room and the dining-room, an 
apparatus called a calorifdre, which contains 
a small receptacle for coal. It will hold 
probably one little fire-shovel full of that 
extravagantly expensive mineral which in 
Paris costs twelve to fifteen dollars a ton— 
not for anthracite, such as we have for 
domestic use, but for a very inferior quality 
of semi-bituminous coal which retails with 
us at about three dollars. In the calorifire 
are four diminutive openings, — each large 
enough to thrust one's fist through. Two of 
these open into the anti-chambre, and two 
into the dining-room, and from them come 
gentle zephyrs of warm air in occasional 
intermittent puffs. The bedrooms and the 
salon are generally not heated at all, although, 
in the latter, I have occasionally noticed a 
transitory difference in temperature produced 
by an armful of fagots or a panful of coals. 
With these insufficient appliances for keeping 
warm, an American in Parisian apartments 
finds himself exposed to frigid surroundings 



A Drea??ier in Paris 45 

to which he is unaccustomed, and to get 
relief there is only one recourse, — the uni- 
versal promenade. 



By the way, every form of outdoor loco- 
motion in France is called a promenade. If 
one calls a cab and takes a drive, it is called a 
promenade en voiture, or should one go on 
horseback one is taking a promenade a cheval. 
Even a sail is a promenade en bateau. My 
promenade is usually on foot, in the evening, 
from four or five o'clock until seven. During 
these hours I like to join the throngs of people 
surging up and down the Rue de Rivoli, under 
the arcades, which for a mile or more cover 
the sidewalk. Then, plunging into the living 
stream of humanity, I drift idly along with 
the crowd on the Avenue de I'Opera, or stand 
gazing at the priceless exhibitions of jewelry 
in the beautiful windows of the shops in the 
Rue de la Paix. It is difficult for me to 
imagine the class of people that buy such 



46 



A Dreamer in Paris 



expensive articles of mere adornment; and 
yet these shops must have customers, for 
their proprietors thrive and wax richer, and 
their windows grow more brilliant and more 

gorgeous year 
by year. Out of 
mere curiosity, I 
stepped inside the 
door of one of the 
least pretentious 
of these shops and 
inquired the price 
of a beautiful scarf 
pin which had at- 
tracted my atten- 
tion. I have for- 
gotten the exact price, but it was greater than 
the total amount of my hard-earned letter of 
credit which I brought with me from home. 

The subsequent happy possessor of that 
pin is welcome to have it — at the price. As 




A Dreamer in Paris 47 

for me, I found more keen enjoyment, a few 
days later, in running against an old French 
bibliotheqtie in one of the quaint narrow 
streets, than any number of scarf pins could 
have given me. The bibliothicaire was not 
a musty, ill-natured, old mummy, such as 
usually conceal their ignorance of books 
under a mask of mysterious monosyllables; 
but a tall, serious-looking girl, with large 
earnest eyes, black hair, and a sensitive 
mouth which contained twin rows of regular 
white teeth. Her forehead was slightly 
wrinkled with study-lines, and, when I en- 
tered the dark room, they deepened as she 
gazed at me and tried to bring back her 
thoughts from the atmosphere of the dead 
past, in the book she was reading, to the 
customer standing before her. 

The evening was far advanced and the 
only light in the room was cast on the sur- 
rounding shelves of books, from a single 
candle that stood on the table at which she 
was seated. 



48 



A Dreamer in Paris 



I was a little tired of reading French books 
and signs, of hearing French spoken, of 
eating French dishes — and 1 enquired of her 
whether she had any English books, espe- 
cially those by Ameri- 
ca n authors. ''Ah! 
out, Monsieur'' — ''Par- 
don I " She mounted 
to the top of a com- 
mon unpainted step- 
ladder, from which 




vantage point she 
could reach 
the top row 
of shelves, 
near the ceil- 
ing. " Voila, 
Monsieur/" 
From the dusty recesses of that ancient library 
she drew forth one of the earlier copies of 
"Helen's Babies," and I held in my hand 
one of the brain products of my friend John 
Habberton! 

^1? 



A Dreamer in Paris 





Ah well! how small the world 
is, after all, and how the unex- 
pected always happens. 

Was it years or only some 
months ago since we sat side 
by side, contentedly smoking 
our cigars and rejoicing in the 
mental exaltation produced 
on us by the dreamy after- 
glow of a gorgeous 
summer sunset ? 

I remember that 




50 A Dreamer in Paris 

we were riding along the old York Road 
and had just swept around the base of an 
obstructing hill when we were suddenly 
enveloped in a crimson haze which had the 
property of making the rather commonplace 
surroundings, things of beauty. An old gray 
house, far up on the hillside, stood out in 
bold relief against the deep-red sky, and we 
both exclaimed at the marvelous transforma- 
tion that had taken place in so short a 
time. While we gazed toward the horizon, 
a few fleecy clouds floated serenely across the 
heavens and disclosed to us the silvery cres- 
cent of the new moon. 

Was it years or only some months ago 
since we clasped hands ''good-night," and 
is that the same silvery moon just topping 
the thousands of twinkling lights of the Place 
de la Concorde ? 



I usually finish my promenade at this point. 
From the sidewalk of the Rue de Rivoli one 



50 A L 



we were riding alo^ ' 


» wk Road 


and had just swept 


t^ase of an 


obstructing hill 


iddenly 


enveloped in a crii; 


had the 


property of '^' ■'■^ 


jn place 


surround in e 


?d orray 


house, "^ 


: in 


bold relief against the deep- 


.:nd we 


both exclaimed at the marveiuu.> 


uuissforrna- 



tion that had taken place in so short a 

While we, gazed t(VJ!^ar4 tile hodzon, 

; ecy clouds floated serenely across tlie 

;!r;.vcns and disclosed to us ''■ '' rry cres- 

cerit of the new m:'>on, 



•ns ago 
S;iK:e we ciaspt!. 

is that the same snvery la- oppiiig 

the thousands of twink?i!v> h ,■ =- Pfnce 

de h Concorde ? 



,f ' 



promena, 



From the sidewalk of the Rue de Rivoli or 



A Dreamer in Paris 



51 



can take in at a glance the noble proportions 
of the scheme, the wide expanse of square 
and avenue, the sumptuous magnificence of 
design, that makes the Avenue des Champs 




Elysees, and its intersecting streets, the most 
beautiful of any thoroughfare on earth. Con- 
ceive the regal beauty of the place endowed 
with all the loveliness that the artistic sense 
of man can produce, and frame the picture 
with a purple golden sky! 



52 A Dreamer in Paris 

At seven o'clock in the evening we have 
dinner. This is an important event in our 
French household. From the time of the 
Grand Monarque the French people have 
been sans pared at table. That amiable 
sovereign goes down into history as a gor- 
mandizer of the first order. It is said of him 
that he ate at one meal ''four platefuls of 
different soups, a whole pheasant, a par- 
tridge, a great plate of salad, two great 
slices of ham, a plate of mutton seasoned 
with garlic, pastry, and after that fruit and 
hard boiled eggs! " There is no such glut- 
tony now in France. From the chefs of the 
wealthy, who have made the cuisine the 
most exquisite in the world, to the more 
humble bonne, who first buys our food and 
then cooks it, there is but a short step to 
the general result. The meals are all well- 
cooked, savory, and of good repute. 



My room is in the house of un bon bourgeois, 



A Dreamer in Paris 



53 



facing the street. It is a square apartment, 
carpeted, and papered with a flower design of 
orange andgreen on a brown background. On 
one side of the room is a large mantel and fire- 
place of cold white marble. With the hottest 
wood-fire that I can 
build in that fire- 
place, the chill of the 
mantel and of the 
facings, hangs over 
the blaze like the 
dampness surround- 
ing the entrance to a 
tomb. On one side 
of the fireplace is a 
secret closet, built into the wall and papered 
over, so that a small keyhole is the only 
evidence of its position. The French delight 
in this sort of thing. The locks on my 
bureau drawers are all at the bottom of the 
drawers and not at the top, and to open 
them one must turn the key around twice, 
while in the case of our front door, the key 




54 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

must be turned three times. Whether this 
is done from pure love of practical joking, or 
from mere gaiety of temperament, is as yet, 
to me, an unsolved problem. My windows 
are large casement structures reaching from 
the floor to the ceiling and opening upon a 
small balcony. They are loose jointed and 
admit the cold air in winter faster than any 
heating apparatus could possibly raise it to a 
comfortable temperature. As for the French 
calorifere and the marble fireplaces, they 
merely aggravate the situation. 



The French are about two thousand years 
behind us in the matter of warming their 
houses in the winter season, and they do not 
seem to care how much they suffer, but bear 
their misery with a fortitude that would be 
heroic were it not so supremely ridiculous. 
When I wring my benumbed hands and 
remark to my landlady, "// fait froid, 
Madame,'' she crosses her arms, looks re- 



A Dreamer in Paris 



55 



signed, and answers, ''Ah! out. Monsieur, 

il ne fait pas chaiidy" 

while she grudgingly 

sends the bonne to the 

nearest marchand de 

bois for another apron- 

ful of dead fagots. 

During the winter one 
would be more com- 
fortable in the wigwam 
of an Indian, than in a 
French apartment house ! 
l^oila tout. 




My window is hung with heavy woolen 
curtains which I draw close at night to 
exclude the penetrating cold. 

Over the marble fireplace is an enormous 
mirror, and on the mantel is a large Louis 
XIV clock, flanked by two candlesticks, 
each carrying three green candles. These 
are not supposed to be lighted, although my 



56 



A Dreamer in Paris 



room boasts neither gas nor electricity. A 
small bougie on the night table by my bed 
furnishes the only light which I have at 
night. As a great favor I could have an ill- 
smelling pHrole lamp with an antiquated 
burner, but I prefer the candle. 




The bed, a massive mahogany affair, fills 
the half of my room between the fireplace 
and the inner wall. It is the masterpiece, 
chef-d'oeuvre, of my apartment. There can 
be no fault-finding with that wonderful 
piece of construction. Standing by its side, 
the top of the mattress comes above my 



A Dreamer in Paris 57 

waist line, and at night, when I climb into 
its lofty security, a sublime feeling of rest 
fills my soul, and I fall asleep in the midst of 
an unfinished prayer for those nearest my 
heart. 



In the morning my eyes first rest upon a 
voluminous overhanging canopy and then 
upon a large framed design, with the legend 
beneath, Oraison a la Ste Fterge. In the 
middle of this picture is a square red surface 
upon which is engraved the following: 

" Mere du sauveur des homines 
Prieipour les Pecheiirs." 

The simple couplet often eases my troubled 
mind, and soothes my restless spirit, like the 
benediction that follows prayer. 



The first meal of the day is petit dejeuner, 
which is taken at any hour one likes, be- 



58 



A Dreamer in Paris 



tween 7 a. m., when the bonne awakes, and 
10 A. M., when she begins to get cross. It 
consists of coffee or chocolate, SLud petit paiu 

(rolls). If one 



is a particular 
favorite of the 
family, one 
may ask for a 
boiled egg — 
nothing more. 
This must 
satisfy one's in- 
ternal cravings 
until noon, 
when every- 
body stops 
work for de- 
jeuner, a much 
more substan- 
tial feast of broiled steak, mutton chops, or a 
meat stew. An after course consists of one 
vegetable, and occasionally a sweet omelette 
and prunes are added for a dessert. 




A Dreamer in Paris 59 

But the principal repast is the dinner at 
seven o'clock in the evening. A great many 
preliminary drinks are indulged in called 
apdratifs, which I never take, however, as 
the ingredients of these decoctions are un- 
known to me — and Paris water is fairly 
palatable and wholesome when taken in 
small quantities. 



At this point in my French experience 
another false idea, bred in ignorance and 
fostered by intolerance, has been forever ex- 
pelled from my mind. 

I was taught to believe that in the matter 
of drinking, the French people surpassed all 
other nations, and I expected to find Paris 
full of intoxicated persons of both sexes. 
My wanderings in the city have not been in 
the secluded avenues of the select, and to the 
houses of the rich, and 1 have not examined 
the various phases of Parisian life through 
the goggles of an automobilist. From the 



6o A Dreamer in Paris 

top of an omnibus, or the impiriale of a 
tram, and on foot, I have penetrated the 
highways and byways of the city from the 
Bois de Vincennes on the east to the Bois de 
Bologne on the west, and from Aubervilliers 
on the north to Montrouge on the south. 
And during these perigrinations I have sat 
for hours in the cafes of the people, "the 
plain people," as Lincoln called them, and 1 
have yet to see a single intoxicated French 
man or woman, either in the cafes or on the 
streets! 



The dinner of my host is not elaborate, but 
it takes a long time to get through with it. 
A regular course, in the beginning of which 
nothing but radishes was served, warned me 
that much was expected in the way of con- 
versation, and I plunged headlong into my 
first French talk — en famille, with a vocifer- 
ousness born of desperation. It must have 
been an awful experience to the sensitive 



A Drea?ner in Paris 6 1 

French folk who were seated around the 
table, but "the most polite people in the 
world " never showed, by word or action, 
the slightest sign of weariness, on the con- 
trary, urging me on, with smiles and bows, 
to renewed exertions. 

In the centre of the dining table was an 
elevated, square table-piece of porcelain 
upon which was placed the principal dish, 
piece de viande, and this was served to us 
without any vegetables. Each of these was 
served as a separate course, and the time con- 
sumed in changing the dishes seemed end- 
less. 



Paris at table in the sixteenth century is 
burlesqued by Rabelais : " At the first course, 
six sorts of carbonadoes, nine sorts of frica- 
sees, cold loins of veal, gravy, soup, hotch- 
pots, marrow-bones, hashes and hiatille 
pies, — with ' eternal drink intermixed.' " The 
fourteenth dish of the second course in- 



62 A Dreamer in Paris 

eluded chitterlings, hog's haslets, neat's 
tongue, chines and peas, brawn heads, pow- 
dered venison, puddings and pickled olives; 
and "all this associated with sempiternal liq- 
uor." Next they ''housed within his muz- 
zle" a third course of ninety-five separate 
dishes, beginning with legs of mutton, lum- 
ber pies with hot sauce, dwarf-herons and 
ribs of pork, and finishing with dry and 
wet sweetmeats, "seventy-eight sorts," and 
cream cheese: and "perpetuity of soaking 
with the whole." 

"If when he had crammed all this down 
his guttural trap-door, he did not immediately 
make the fish swim again in his paunch, 
death would pack him off in a thrice." 



Tighe Hopkins remarks, "Prodigious 
feasting was the rule where the cost was 
not in question. At the banquet given to 
Catherine de Medicis by the town of Paris 
in June, 1549, there were served, amid 



A Dreamer in Paris 63 

other delicacies, thirty peacocks, thirty-three 
pheasants, twenty-one swans, nine cranes, 
thirty-three egrets, sixty-six turkeys, thirty 
kids, six hogs, thirty 
capons, ninety-nine 
pullets, thirty - three 
hares, ninety -nine 
pigeons, ninety-nine 
turtle-doves and thir- 
teen geese, a menu 
not ungrateful to 
Catherine, who was 
a gross feeder and 
subject to indigestion. 
During the reign of 
Charles IX, sumptuary 
laws were passed 
against extravagant living, and it was made 
a civil offense to give a guest a dinner of 
more than three courses." 




I wish that those laws were now in force, 
for we frequently sit for two hours over a 



64 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

very frugal meal so far as cost is concerned, 
but extravagantly served in the measure of 
time. An American is forced to notice the 
French liberality in napkins. Mine is as 
large as a towel, and is made of coarse linen, 
bordered with a fringe, and ornamented with 
two blood-red bands at each end. It is called 
a serviette, and as the same word is used for 
a towel, I frequently get mixed in my mind 
as to which of the two articles is across my 
knees at table. Hopkins dates the table-nap- 
kin in France from about the middle of the 
fifteenth century: ** During the Renaissance 
napery in rich houses was becoming very 
dainty; somewhat later, the serviette was us- 
ually perfumed; and in 1639, one Matthias 
Giegher, in the flower of his genius, wrote a 
treatise in Italian upon the twenty-seven 
ways in which it might be folded. Here it 
took the form of a shell, here of a mitre, here 
of a dog with a collar, here of a cross of 
Lorraine, and here of a sucking pig, as the 
pantler's taste inspired him. 



A Dreamer in Paris 65 

'' Louis XIV, whose taste was most correct 
when simplest, had his napkin rolled in the 
form of a M/o«." 

A large bone ring is provided, by mine 
host, for the 
purpose of 
identifying 
each napkin 
and for pre- 
serving them inviolate during the intervals 
between meals; but I have never been 
able to roll mine, like Louis XIV, into a 
sufficiently small compass to go inside of the 
ring. 




It is hard for me to realize that all 
those whom I see around me are in 
their own country and that I am the 
''foreigner." 

In the "pursuit of happiness," which is 
guaranteed to every American under "The 
Constitution," I ran across a most galling 



66 



A Dreamer in Paris 



form of imperialism and tyrannical interfer- 
ence by the French Government, which 
upsets my equilibrium at frequent intervals 
and makes me long to utter a forcible pro- 
test. I cannot understand the patient sub- 
mission of the French- 
man who smokes and 
who is compelled by 
law to purchase the uni- 
versally poor quality of 
cigars and tobacco which 
is distributed by the in- 
numerable government 
stations called bureaus de 
tabac. One's individual 
taste and preference 
count for nothing, and 
one must smoke the 
tobacco given by the government, or go 
without. Each time that I buy a cigar the 
polite woman behind the desk assures me 
that it is delicious, and, encouraged by her 
positive manner, I usually invest in a package 




A Dreamer in Paris 67 

of four, or in a small box, with a glass top, 
containing six. The result is uniformly 
discouraging. It really does not seem to 
make any difference how much I pay for 
them, the cigars are invariably bad. For 
quince centimes (three cents) one buys a 
wretched little cigar called a demi-Londres, 
while for cinquante centimes (ten cents) 
one gets a much larger cigar and a pro- 
portionate amount of wretchedness. The 
quality of the tobacco is all the same, and 
by paying more money one simply gets 
more of it. 



The manner in which the government 
tobacco is forced upon a reluctant public 
reminds me of the ancient French method 
by which the king disposed of his wine: 

'*When the king sends his wine to 
market, the innkeepers must at once cease 
from selling, and all the criers must cry the 
king's wine morning and evening at the 



68 



A Dreamer in Paris 



crossways of Paris. Having entered the 
business, the king pushed his advantage to 
the end. His right in the wine market was 
called the han le roy, and 
the king's ban was noti- 
fied in the neighborhood 
of every tavern in the 
town. 

** The king's wine was 
sold wholesale and retail, 
in a quarter of Paris af- 
fected to the commerce. 
What came to be known 
as King's-Wine-Street, 
Rue Vin-le-Roy, was 
a narrow thoroughfare 
abutting on the Rue des 
Lombards, which was the wine merchant's 
mart and centre." In the same arbitrary 
manner by which the present French Gov- 
ernment excludes all dealers in tobacco, the 
former king, by force of feudal privilege, 
carried his barrels of wine within the market 




A Dreamer in Paris 69 

doors, and kept the trade outside until he had 
sold them. In those days the French subject 
drank the king's wine or nothing, in much 
the same spirit of discontent, I imagine, in 
which the French citizen of to-day smokes 
the government tobacco or nothing. 



Many Americans— particularly the young 
— get their ideas of the French people and 
their manners from books written by Brit- 
ish authors. Unfortunately these books are 
usually tinctured with British prejudice and 
are full of insular pride and offensive 
superiority. They give to the American 
reader a picture of France as seen through 
alien eyes, and in many cases the picture is 
ruined. 

I purchased a book recently at a fashionable 
bookstore on the Avenue L'Opera, which, 
the obliging clerk assured me, gave to the 
inquiring stranger full information regarding 
French life in town and country. It was 



70 



A Dreamer in Paris 



written by a woman who informs the reader 
that she is from Dublin, and she modestly 
adds that '*the women of Dublin dress with 
far greater taste than their sisters of Paris." 
In the same delicate manner she continues: 




"I am assured that the dresses of the girls 
and women of Dublin leave Paris nowhere!" 
The heroic efforts of the first Napoleon to 
make his beloved France the imperial mistress 



A Dreamer in Paris 71 

of the world, — a task at which the most 
idle dreamer must admit he nearly suc- 
ceeded, — is dismissed by this writer in one 
sentence: "Two tomes to prove that what 
France wants is another Napoleon — the very 
thing that nearly ruined her." Napoleon, a 
*nhing"! 

She also writes of the '* Parisianized, en- 
nobled American subject who wants to see 
her admirable and chivalrous husband. Court 
Chamberlain, or something of the sort." 

The Irish in the author's nature crops out 
in the following: '' Even a British ass, with 
time on his hands and millions to squander, 
can discover an original method of going to 
the dogs and casting his millions into the 
bottomless pit. But what can the French 
idiot do after he has sent his shirts to London 
to be washed, and invested in an automo- 
bile.?" What indeed can he do? Even 
Parisian society has its limitations and I am 
satisfied that the poor fellow would not be 
permitted in the salons of the beau-monde, 



72 



A Dreamer in Paris 



without a shirt to his back. France has had 
her experience with the sans- culottes, but the 
sans-chemise party is as yet unknown. 

But when this Celtic critic describes ''the 
French idiot," she actually loses breath: 
"He is such a superlative dandy and hum- 




bug — I would fain use a hideous word, which 
describes him still better in three letters, if it 
were not for its inexcusable offensiveness — 
that he cannot bring sincerity to bear upon 



A Dreamer in Paris 73 

his imaginary passion for sport, and looks 
ten times more absurd when he is playing the 
athlete than when he is contentedly playing 
the fool. He is the 'sedulous ape,' not to 
literature, like Stevenson in his young days, 
but to the Anglo-Saxon: and the folly lasts 
on to the brink of age." 

This book may have a large circulation, or 
a very small one. I sincerely hope that it 
may rest in a state of "innocuous desue- 
tude," for it serves no purpose beyond that 
of fomenting a hatred of the English which 
in France, it seems to me, already amounts to 
a national creed. 



I should advise Americans to study France 
through original sources, and draw their own 
conclusions. It would surprise many of my 
countrymen to read the life of Benjamin 
Franklin, and learn from that how much we 
are indebted to Frenchmen for our national 
independence. It would surprise them also 
to see a statue of Washington in a Paris 



y4 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

square, and another statue erected by Amer- 
ican women in tiiis city •' in grateful acknowl- 
edgment of the assistance given to us by 
France in our War for Independence." But 
above all things Americans should know and 
understand that France is a prosperous and 
successful Republic, and that the three words 
which one sees in Paris at every turn in the 
road: ''LiberU, EgaliU, FraterniU," ^re very 
near relations to 
our own ** Vir- 
tue, Liberty, In- 
dependence." 1 
have never seen 
a more happy iPym 
or a more industrious community, and have 
never experienced a more cordial reception 
than I received at the hands of the French 
citoyen. 




These thoughts must be truthful or they 
had best not be written. When one starts 
out to write a romance the plot may be in 



A Dreamer in Paris 



75 



part or altogether the work of the imagina- 
tion, but a supposed record of events and 
observations, if falsely recorded, is nothing 
more than a tissue of lies. I am bound, there- 
fore, to write that 
I saw the famous 
Cathedral of Notre 




Dame, and was grievously disappointed. 
The pile of dilapidated, weather-gnawed 
gray stone aroused no emotion in my 
breast, and when I paused on the step upon 
which Napoleon stood when he crowned 
Josephine, I was unable to clothe the hard 



76 A Dreamer in Paris 

impoverished-looking surroundings with 
the mantle of imagination. To my mind 
everything was bleak, bare, and forebod- 
ing. The past stood before me, like an old 
man, naked and deformed; and on either 
side there was neither loveliness nor sym- 
metry. The pillars supporting the roof are 
all out of line, as though put there by chance, 
and the oddly placed windows have no con- 
nection with any continuous design. The 
Cathedral stands on an island in the River 
Seine which separates Paris into two parts. 
"In the Middle Ages Paris was divided into 
three distinct parts: La Cite on the island, 
La Ville on the right bank, and the Quartier 
Latin, or University, on the left bank of the 
river." The little islet known as L'lle de la 
Cite was supposed to have included all of 
Lutetia, the original home of the tribe of the 
Parish or Gauls, and " Notre Dame stands on 
a site successively occupied by a Pagan 
temple and a Christian basilica of the time of 
the Merovingian kings." The present build- 



A Dreamer in Paris 77 

ing was constructed between the twelfth and 
fifteenth centuries. 

The Httle guide, who speaks Enghsh with 
a decidedly cockney accent, and who 
dropped his H's hke a native Londoner, gave 
me all of the foregoing information, and 
much more besides; but I was not impressed 
or soul-stirred by his glib descriptions of 
this, "one of the noblest specimens of 
Gothic architecture." I forgot the beautiful 
description by Victor Hugo, and was lost in 
melancholy reverie at the sight of the musket 
ball which killed Mgr. Affre during the insur- 
rection of 1848. The ball and two vertebrae 
are kept in the sacristy. Here also are some 
relics; a piece of the cross on which Christ 
was crucified, and a collection of vestments 
and robes worn by the priests. I have my 
doubts about the bit of wood, and the other 
things seemed like tawdry tinsel. 



As I passed down the aisle a marriage cere- 
mony was being solemnized in one of the 



78 



A Dreamer in Paris 



small adjoining chapels. I pitied the bride— 
a sallow-faced woman of middle age — who 
sat patiently during the ceremony that united 

her to a man of most 
unpleasant appear- 
ance. Scarcely a 
hundred of the 
faithful now attend 
the regular services 
of Notre Dame and 
these are culled 
from amongst the 
poorer classes of 
the surrounding district; the other attend- 
ants are chiefly drawn thither out of cu- 
riosity, and their offerings in the matter of 
fees help to defray the expenses of an im- 
poverished parish. The glory of Notre 
Dame has departed. To me its old gray 
walls seem to be but a mile-stone marking the 
advance of civilization and forever pointing 
backward to a remote and dismal past. 




A Dreamer in Paris 



79 



I find more pleasure in the curious old 
book-stalls which line the left bank of the 
Seine just across the bridge. I love to lounge 
along the walls when the winter's sun gives 
us an occasional fine day and, at mine ease, 




fish out the rare bits from an ocean of 
mediocrity. The sport is quite as exciting, 
and the reward much more generous, than 
can ever fall to the lot of a disciple of 
Walton. My hook first baited with a gener- 
ous slice of politeness, I approach the old 
woman in charge and make some trivial 
purchase of the value, perhaps, of one sou. 
This keeper of the fish pond having been 



8o 



A Dreamer in Paris 



won over, the sport is mine for an unin- 
terrupted hour, or the whole afternoon, if I 
so choose. From one end to the other and 
from top to bottom, I can drag and rake and 
fish for the musty books to my heart's con- 
tent. Like a true sportsman, when I catch a 
sprat or a minnow, I toss 
it back and fish again. 
One day I pulled out an old 
copy of Les Amours de 
TeUmaque, with the im- 
print 1802. Hastily I ex- 
amined the pages and 
found them perfect. The 
book was a quaint little 12 mo. and the print 
was large and distinct. The binding was in 
the original calf. 

It required some courage to approach 
Madame and assume a careless air while she 
took the treasure in her grimy hands and 
gazed at me through her large round specta- 
cles. I remember how 1 wished that I had 
not been so well-dressed— for the price is al- 




A Dreamer in Paris 8 1 

ways made to suit your personal appearance. 
However, my hands were soiled from hand- 
ling the books, and my linen not too clean. 
I remember also that two days' growth of a 
grayish beard adorned my chin. This was 
in my favor, but I gasped when she said: 
*' Ah Old, Monsieur, cinq sous!" Joyously 
I paid the coppers and hurried away. I have 
been afraid to return to that particular fish 
pond. In fact, I imagine that my feelings 
are those of a receiver of stolen goods. 



The Seine, which divides Paris into two 
parts, is crossed by beautiful broad bridges; 
some of solid stone arches, and others of 
graceful iron construction. I am surprised 
at the magnificence and the harmonious 
beauty of the approaches to these bridges. 
There is no crowding or massing of ugly 
utilitarian details; no confusion at either end. 

I can recall the impression made upon me 
when I first saw the East River bridge, 



82 



A Dreamer in Paris 



which connects the cities of Brooklyn and 
New York. It appeared to me as if the 
bridge had been made some distance away, 

and then had been 
lifted in its entirety 
and set down with- 
out any apparent 
design or reason 
upon the tops of 
the houses which 
border the river in 
both cities. Here, 
in Paris, the broad 
sweep of boulevard 
and squares serves as an exact and perfect base 
line from which the eye can start in restful 
anticipation and follow the noble outlines of 
pillar and statue, of massive square blocks, 
and of graceful hanging ornamentation, 
without let or hindrance. 




In no other country is there such a uni- 
versal adaptation of the principles of grace 



A Dreamer in Paris 83 

and beauty to the common things of every- 
day surroundings. The houses are of a 
general uniformity in style, color, and design 
and the hand of the artiste is 
visible in every direction. The 
ordinary lamp-posts are models 
of curving elegance. 

I miss, with much relief, the 
unsightly telegraph poles, and 
the ugly network of dangerous 
telephone and electric wires of 
my native land. In Paris all of 
these necessary adjuncts to 
modern civilization are put safely 
beneath the surface, together 
with the most perfect system of 
underground transportation it has been my 
good fortune to see. 




The A/letropolitan Railway, operated by 
electricity, conveys me, with extraordinary 
comfort and facility, from one part of the 
city to another for the small sum of three 



84 



A Dreamer in Paris 



sous. It is marvelous, and, to a dreamer, 
enchanting, to disappear into tlie earth at the 
end of a weary prome- 
nade to the Place de 
'Etoile, and in a few 
moments appear 
again at the Hotel de 
Ville at the other end 
of the city. What 
need have I for the 
enchanted carpet of 
the oriental romance ? 
I have only to drop into the bowels of old 
Paris, and presto! I am at the place where I 
would be. 




There is one huge monstrosity in this 
beautiful city that stands in its defiant ugli- 
ness like an enormous scaffolding in the 
midst of a garden. Every day my eye is of- 
fended and my anger is aroused by that hid- 
eous structure called the Eiffel Tower. Orig- 
inally built for the Exposition and as an 



A Dreamer in Paris 



85 



attraction for the motley crowd of tourists 
who delight in scenic railways, revolving 
wheels and marine shutes, it has been 
permitted to stand in its overtowering 
offensiveness, by an indulgent au- 
thority. It is about as graceful and 
harmonious as the steel skeleton of an 
American "sky-scraper," and is with- 
out any of the latter's usefulness. 
One cannot help wishing that the 
same fate had 
overtaken the 
builders of the 
Eiffel Tower 
as that which 
i nterrupted 
the work on the Tower of Babel. 




ib 



Oh ! for a bath-room ! The large apartment 
house in which 1 am living in Paris, contains 
upwards of forty rooms, divided into suites, 
containing salons, salle-a-mangers, cham- 



86 A Dreamer in Paris 

bres, anti-chambres and cuisines, but there 
is not a single bath-room, or a bath-tub, in 
the entire building! I can go further and as- 
sert with confidence that there is not a bath- 
tub to be found in the length of our block, 
which contains more than a dozen five-story, 
brown-stone buildings. In a despondent 
mood, 1 asked a friend where such luxuries 
could be obtained by a stranger in Paris. 
He advised me to go to the Elysee Palace 
Hotel, situated, within four blocks of my 
apartments, on the Avenue Champs Elysees. 
Upon further inquiry, I fou-nd that this hotel 
was advertised as "the most beautiful and 
fashionable hotel and restaurant in the world, 
occupying the finest site in Europe," and I 
became cautious and wary. Further inves- 
tigation revealed the information that this 
hotel is '* patronized by Kings, Princes, 
Peers, Potentates of the East, and the Elite of 
American and European society." 

With my foot on the threshold of this 
magnificence, within a few feet of a bath- 



A Dreamer in Paris 



87 



tub, my experience in the Rue de la Paix 
recurred to my memory, and sorrowfully 
counting the cost, 
I turned my back 
on the pile of regal 
sumptuousness, 
and walked sadly 
away. "Cleanli- 
ness is next to god- 
liness" — if the cost 
is not too great. In 
this case the difference in cost is too much to 
admit of comparison. 




t|f 



To a man of quiet tastes, and one who 
loves contemplation from the safe vantage 
ground of an unnoticed corner, there is more 
or less offensiveness in the exuberance of 
the average American tourist whom he is 
bound to meet in Paris. Some of these ex- 
amples of concentrated energy might be 
described as locomotives in trousers, so 



88 



A Dreamer in Paris 



great is their propelling power. When one 
of these human machines arrives in this city 
he proceeds to " take in the whole town," in 
one day. Oi course, he is not successful, 
but the number of places that he inspects 
with his national thoroughness is surprising. 
Those who furnish '* places of interest and 
amusement " for the entertainment of the 
tourist are taxed to their limit in providing 
new sensations and experiences. There is a 
wide range to cover, from the list now given 
in an up-to-date guide-book, and the male 
tourist usually begins with that stale vul- 
garity called the Moulin Rouge. 
This resort of foreigners differs 
in no manner from any of the 
familiar "variety" shows of all 
countries and has no reason for 
existence— beyond that of amus- 
ing the tourist. 

The capacity of these sight- 
seers is unlimited. One of them 
assured me that in a two 




A Dreamer in Paris 89 

weeks' residence in Paris he had seen all of 
the public buildings and palaces, the churches, 
the theatres, the museums, the gardens, and 
even the Morgue, "a place built to receive 
the unknown dead, picked up in the street 
or fished up from the river; placed in a room 
of exceedingly low temperature, and exhib- 
ited for identification behind large panes of 
glass." He had also visited the Catacombes, 
"an underground city of the dead, where 
the streets or vaults down below bear the 
same names as the streets above. Here he 
was 'treated' to an exhibition of untold 
millions of human bones and skulls, brought 
there from the Paris cemeteries for genera- 
tions past." He also visited Les Egouts — the 
sewers — and he looked down on me with a 
fine contempt, when I told him of the time I 
had wasted dreaming the hours away, in the 
warm corner of an old cafe on the Rue St. 
Honore. 

1 was attracted thither, one very cold day, 



90 A Dreamer in Paris 

by the cheerful glow of a modern-looking 
stove. Such an abundance of heat, in this 
city of small economies, thought I, denotes a 
generous host, so I took possession, forth- 




with, of an out-of-the-way corner from 
where I could observe the ** little people," of 
the Rue St. Honore, **the busy working Rue 
St. Honore," as described by Hare, "lined 
by the tall, many-windowed houses which 
have witnessed so many Revolutions. They 



A Dreamer in Paris 91 

have all the picturesqueness of innumera- 
ble balconies, high slated roofs with dormer 
windows, window-boxes full of carnations 
and bright with crimson flowers" through 
the summer, and they overlook an ever- 
changing crowd, in great part composed of 
men in blouses and women in white aprons 
and caps. 

Ever since the fourteenth century the Rue 
St. Honore has been one of the busiest streets 
in Paris. It was the gate leading into this 
street which was attacked by Jeanne D'Arc in 
1429. It was the fact that the Cardinal de 
Bourbon and the Due de Guise had been seen 
walking together at the Porte St. Honore that 
was said to have turned half the moustache 
of Henri of Navarre suddenly white, from a 
presentiment of the crime which has become 
known as the " Massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew." Here, in 1648, the barricade was 
raised which gave the signal for all the 
troubles of the Fronde. It was at No. 3 — 
then called L'Auberge des Trois Pigeons — 



92 A Dreamer in Paris 

that Ravaillac was lodging when he was 
waiting to murder Henri IV. Here at No. 
211, now the Hotel St. James, was the old 
Hotel of the Noailles family, which suffered 
so terribly in the great Revolution. At No. 
96 a plaque marks the house where Moliere 
was born. It was in the Rue St. Honore 
that the first gun was fired in the Revolution 
of July, 1830, which overturned Charles X: 
and here, in the Revolution of 1848 a bloody 
combat took place between the insurgents 
and the military. Throughout the Rue St. 
Honore, as Marie Antoinette was first enter- 
ing Paris, the poissardes brought her bou- 
quets, singing — 

** La rose est la reine desfleurs, 
Antoinette est la reine des coeurs; " 

and here, as she was being taken to the scaf- 
fold, they crowded round her execution-cart 
and shouted: 

* ' Madame Veto avail promts 
De faire 6gorger tout Paris, 



A Dreamer in Paris 93 

Mais son coup a manqiU 
Grace a nos cannofiiers ; 
Dansons la carmagnole 

Au bruit du son 

Du canon I " 

O wicked Paris, charming Paris, Hell to-day, 
and Paradise to-morrow! 

"Paris vit, Paris a un visage, des gestes, 
des habitudes, des tics, des manies. Paris, 
quand on le connait, n'est pas une ville, c'est 
un Ure animi, une personne naturelle, qui a 
ses moments de fureur, de folie, de betise, 
d'enthousiasme, d'honneteti et de lucideti : 
comme un homme qui est parfois charmant et 
parfois insupportable, mais jamais indif- 
ferent." 



From my corner in the cafi which is also 
a bureau de tabac I can watch the " little peo- 
ple " as they come in from the terrible cold. 
A poor old woman whose face is yellow and 
wrinkled with age, has drawn a low stool 
close to the fire, and her long bony arms are 



94 



A Dreamer in Paris 



extended around its genial warmth, as if she 
would embrace it close to her flattened chest. 
But she bows to me with quiet dignity, and 
says: '' Bon jour, M'sieu,'' and I quickly 
raise my hat in acknowledgment, and reply, 




'' Bon jour, Madame. II fait froid.*' She 
makes the universal rejoinder, ''Ah! oui, 
il ne fait pas chaud,'" and smiles contentedly 
as Madame, who presides over the counter, 
measures out a sou's worth of tobacco. 
Then enters a long robed priest with clean- 
shaven face, and I notice an expression of 
guarded politeness on the face of Madame 



A Dreamer in Paris 



95 



while she listens to his rapidly spoken appeal 
pour les pauvres. Our caf6 and bureau de ta- 
bac is also a sub-station of the postal depart- 
ment, and Madame is 
kept busy selling stamps 
to every kind and con- 
dition of people. The 
little bonne trips in, with 
red cheeks and cold fin- 
gers, to mail a letter for 
her mistress, and is suc- 
ceeded by a fat cocker, 
his full bloated face pur- 
ple with the unusual 
cold. 

I am astonished to see 
the latter politely raise 
his high glazed hat to 
Madame before he lights his cigarette at the 
tiny jet of gas, and then to notice the ex- 
change of civilities,— the '' Merci, Madame'' 
and the '' Bon jour, M'sieu," — as he opens 
the door to depart. 




96 A Dreamer in Paris 

It is getting late in the day and the caf6 is 
becoming uncomfortably full of people who 
take an aperitif before dinner : men in wide 
bow-shaped trousers, working men and small 
shop-keepers, who look at me politely but 
with evident curiosity. I think that Madame 
has whispered to one or two that the stranger 
is an American, for they appear to regard me 
with friendliness. But I am a foreigner and 
feel I am a restraint upon their conversation; 
so, making my bow to Madame, I am again 
jostling with the crowd on the busy streets. 



This evening my promenade extended to 
the banks of the Seine, and while I leaned 
over the stone parapet and idly watched the 
dark current of the river, a thousand lights 
began to twinkle and glimmer in the reddish- 
gray atmosphere, and then hundreds more, 
until my entire surroundings flashed and 
sparkled with miniature stars. Then, low 
down in the firmament hung the yellow moon 



A Dreamer in Paris 



97 



and it seemed strange and artificial amid the 
queer French environment. Had I burst into 
poetry, it must have been mihelanguefran- 
gais because it seemed to me like a different 




creation from the plain old 
moon of my boyhood 
days. A different moon, but by no means 
a better, a dearer, or a more beautiful, object 
than when it appeared to me, as it tipped 
the rippling waters of the broad Susque- 
hanna, and clothed each dark islet with a 
silvery robe of mystery and enchantment. 
Ah ! out. But it is not characteristic of the 
French people to look mournfully into the 
past. 1 never hear a Parisian expressing 



98 A Dreamer in Paris 

himself in tlie language of, "it might have 
been." His proud nature scorns to reveal 
the agony of loss, or the anguish of remorse. 
If he feels these emotions he never speaks of 
them. "But are you //^wrsad.?" I asked 
of a native who by his genial manners and 
evident culture appeared to me the best fitted 
to answer the question. "Sometimes, to 
my self, '' he replied in broken English, and it 
seemed to me to be all sufficient, and truly 
Parisian. 



From my corner in the Rue St. Honore I 
watched the celebration of '' Rdveillon'' on 
the night before Christmas. Only in Paris is 
the day ushered in with such joyous and 
noisy ceremony. Early in the evening the 
streets and the principal boulevards began to 
fill with excited men and women, good-na- 
turedly jostling each other from the sidewalk 
even to the middle of the pavement. 

Those who found seats outside of the 



98 A Dreamer 


" ts 


iiimself in the : 


U have 


been/' His pr- 


.' reveal 


the agony of losi., or the 


ui remorse. 


! f he feels th ese em ■ ' • ' 


^ "'^eaks oi 


them. *'Bn.t- ;»re y- 


\ ssked 


of a n. 


^:'^.i 


evident cuituie , 


e best fitted 


to answer the muc-.uui;. 


vjinetimes, to 



myself," he replied in broken English, and it 
seemed to me to be all sufficient^ and truly 

Parisian, 

ion ore I 
■' R^veillon" on 
Only in Paris is 



k . 

From my cor- 
watched the ct, 
the night before Cliiistr,]< 
the day ushered in with such joyous and 
noisy ceremony. Early in the evening the 
streets and the principal bouievar(ls began to 
fid with excited men and women, good-na- 
turedly jostling each other from the sidewalk 
even to the middle of the pavement. . 

T ho found seats outside 



A Dreamer in Paris 99 

cafis were fortunate and they held them 
with a tenacity born of experience, for Rdveil- 
Ion lasts all night. 

From midnight until nearly dawn there 
was a universal demand for boudin and there 
was much feasting and merriment. The 
more serious-minded attended services at the 
churches during the midnight hour. Here 
high mass was celebrated, and delightful 
music announced the advent of Noil. 



Over in the Quartier Latin there is a 
narrow winding street called the Rue de 
Dragon. The sidewalk is so narrow that 
there is scarcely room for one pedestrian to 
pass another. On both sides of the street are 
old-fashioned boutiques or small shops, cafis, 
and restaurants. A general view of the 
street gives one the impression of being in 
a theatre, and one expects to see the curtain 
fall over a quaint and charming bit of scen- 
ery, or to see the houses suddenly shifted to 



lOO A Dreamer in Paris 




one side to make 
way for another 
scene of which you catch 
tantalizing glimpses 
through the courtyards. 
Here is the Academic 
Medicis— of which I was 
duly elected an honorary member, upon the 
payment of an entrance fee consisting of a 
varied assortment of drinks, the names and 
origins of which *'no man knoweth." The 
personnel of the class was as varied and for- 
eign as the drinks; but I was impressed with 
the fact that other nationalities were more 
in evidence than the French. The few who 
were there were very young — and very 
noisy. They did most of the talking and 



A Dreamer in Paris loi 

singing, while the others worked. One en- 
ters the Academic across a roughly paved 
courtyard. A swinging door on the first 
floor admits one to a large atelier in which 
perhaps thirty or forty students of all ages 
and nationalities are working from daylight 
to darkness. Some of the more ambitious 
work also at night. 

During my first visit I was fortunate to en- 
ter the room unobserved by the class, and, 
removing my hat— a very necessary action 
which one is cautioned to take by a promi- 
nent notice in four languages— I took a 
humble seat against the wall and quietly ab- 
sorbed the atmosphere of which I had heard 
so much said, both for and against it. I was 
in a large, very dirty room lighted by slant- 
ing sky-lights in the roof. Around the walls 
there hung a nondescript collection of crude 
half-finished paintings — invariably of the 
nude— all bearing evidence of hasty, slovenly 
work, but each one possessing some feature 
of skill which if properly and patiently 



I02 A Dreamer in Paris 

trained might have produced better results. 
There were other rude pictures on the walls 
which can only be described as indecent. 
Two slight barribres, — single rails laid on 
posts about three feet high — divided the room 
into three classes. In the centre of one, on a 
small elevated platform, stood the female 
model — the most uncommonly ugly creature 
that I have ever seen. She was entirely nude 
and posed in hour periods with intervals of 
fifteen minutes for rest. When I looked at 
her, I forgave the artists for their ill-digested 
work that appeared on the walls. 



There was another dream which had a 
painful awakening in the famous Quartier 
Latin. Who has not heard of the ^m^//^ .? 
a fascinating creature, all smiles and bows, a 
bewitching, irresponsible, coquettish little 
person, full of airs and graces, of dimples 
and laughter. Who has not seen her foot — 
on canvas — her dainty ankle, and the en- 
drcWng frou-frou of her skirts ? 



A Dreamer in Paris 103 



Away with the thought! There is no such 
person in Paris. Day by day I haunt the 
academies in quest of the type 
grisette and my student friends 
tell me that to-morrow, and 
again to-morrow eve shall see 
a specimen of this rara avis. 
Once they assured me that a 
genuine type of the genus 
Trilby was safely caged in a 
certain studio, and thither I 
went to see— a flat-chested, 
unkempt child of the streets; 
brazen and ignorant, un- 
washed and disgusting. 




Great artists come from these places, no 
doubt, in much the same manner as an 
exquisite flower will grow from rotten soil. 
I can explain it in no other way. 

There are a great many cases where this 
kind of soil produces more weeds than 



I04 



A Dreamer in Paris 



flowers. Paris is full of artistic weeds: men 
and women who toil all day, and half of the 
night, in the laborious effort of trying to 
make " a silk purse out of a sow's ear." If 
these misguided male enthusiasts would de- 
vote one-half of their so- 
called genius — a word, 
by the way, that has 
been defined as "the in- 
definite power of taking 
pains " or the power of 
taking indefinite pains, 
— to the less glorious but 
the more certain labor of 
digging a garden with a 
short handled spade they 
would be known by the 
fruits of their toil, and not by the squalor of 
their surroundings. The female artistic weeds 
in the Latin Quarter are even more numerous 
than the male variety. They are to be seen 
everywhere, and are of all kinds and condi- 
tions. There is the young and clinging, the 




A 'Dreamer in Paris 105 

teary-eyed and imaginative creature who 
worships, afar off, the lofty and unattainable; 
and there is the solid and grimly-determined 
woman of middle age with enough concen- 
trated energy — bottled up, like a storage 
battery— to conquer fate at every encounter. 
From one point of view, it is fortunate 
that these women have chosen this kind of 
life rather than the old-fashioned, dull, mo- 
notony called housekeeping; from the men's 
point of view, who might have been their 
husbands, it may be called Providential. 



These men, who would be better employed 
in cultivating the soil, and these women who 
would, with proper training, make good 
dressmakers or milliners, are constantly using 
the word ''Bohemian." This term, like a 
mantle, covers such a multitude of sins and 
uncleanliness, that it is best not to lift it and 
expose the ugliness beneath. 

If a man wears baggy corduroy trousers, 



Io6 A Dreamer in Paris 

and a flannel shirt which he changes once a 
month, and if he lives in a dirty garret which 
the most wretched in America would hesi- 
tate to occupy, his mode of living is called 
Bohemian. If a woman lives in the same 
manner — excepting the shirt and trousers — 
she can adopt the same excuse for her de- 
generacy. 

But there are many grades of Bohemia. 
The most elevated and advanced condition is 
to live in a bedroom, and wash the dishes 
in the bath-tub ! 



Accursed be he who invented *' Table 
d'hote!" 1 first came under its baneful in- 
fluence in England — merrie England ! — but my 
digestion was unimpaired, and a healthy 
stomach wrestled with the torment in such a 
vigorous American way that, like Christian, I 
passed by unharmed. But the dragon held 
me fast in Paris — beautiful Paris — where the 
horny claws of Table d'hote are buried so 



A Dreamer in Paris 107 

deeply in the bowels of the nation that noth- 
ing can save it from a lingering and miserable 
end. 

It is sad to contemplate the ravages made 
amongst the Latin races by this frightful 
habit of Table d'hote. In Italy it has depopu- 
lated cities, decimated villages, and ruined 




the country. Hollow-cheeked Venetians, 
calm in their misery and hopeless in the 
chains of a habit which has totally enslaved 
them, whispered to me a tale of woe which 
aroused my indignation and claimed my pro- 
found pity. "It was the English tourist," 
they said, ** who first brought this curse upon 
our country "—and a far-away look of cold- 



lo8 A Dreamer in Paris 

storage indigestion swept across tlieir fine 
Italian noses — and otlier features, — "or was 
it the Greeks " — and tlien they would subside 
into a profound lethargy while the waiters 
changed their plates and gave them double 
sets of knives, forks, and spoons for the 
eighth course of their never-ending dinner. 
It was bad in Italy. It is still worse in 
France, for here the cunning ingenuity of a 
race of gourmands finds ample scope in the 
exercise of a passion before which all other 
human emotions sink into complete oblivion. 
This monstrosity of appetite, this night- 
mare of feasts, begins with a collection of 
leather and marble dishes, — covered with 
sauces made of various colored paints, — 
called Hors d'oeuvres. In the preparation of 
these dishes the stomach of an ostrich is first 
examined to ascertain what kind of food re- 
mains in it undigested, and this food is care- 
fully removed and fried for several days in 
sourx^z;^ ordinaire until it looks like mud. It 
is then mixed with burnt leather and marble 



A Dreamer in Paris 109 

dust, and thickened with iron filings. A light 
coating of ready-mixed paint of various col- 
ors tempts the unwary to taste these soul- 
destroyers and then— oh ! my suffering body ! 
— the dreadful habit begins. How shall 1 
describe the slow, long-drawn-out interval 
preceding the tablespoonful of watery soup, 
— served in enormous stone cold dishes, — 
followed by an interminable period of time 
during which one stares in stony silence at 
his opposite neighbor,— for hours and hours 
— until a tormenting shadow of relief comes 
in the shape of a small portion of green 
beans. Then ages of time and a rattle of 
dishes, knives and forks prefacing a course 
of green peas. And so on and so forth, 
until the weary end comes at last and the 
waiters cease from troubling while the 
travelers are at rest. 



Everywhere in Paris, at all hours of the 
day and night, and upon every occasion, can 



1 1 o A Dreamer in Paris 

be heard the blowing of horns. With Amer- 
icans the impulse to make a noise finds vent 
and expression in the ringing of bells and the 
clanging of gongs, but here the horn is al- 
most universal. The conductor blew a horn 
to start the engine that brought us to Paris 
from Boulogne. Women with horns stood 
at every road crossing along the entire route. 
Horns are used on the tram-cars; horns on 
the busses; horns on the automobiles, on the 
bicycles, on the fire engines, all tooting, toot- 
ing, tooting, from early morn till dewy eve. 
There is something infantile about it, some- 
thing childish and silly it seemed to me, and 
yet I don't know that the ringing of bells and 
the clanging of gongs is any better. The 
Chinese, I believe, originated both of these for 
destroying repose, and imperiling the soul. 



Of the fifteen thousand cab drivers in 
Paris, I made the acquaintance of but one. 
His stand is on the Avenue d'Antin and his 



A Dreamer in Paris 1 1 1 

number is 9999. It was his number that 
first attracted me toward him; for, I thought, 
if there is any luck in odd numbers four 
nines must have a large share. For one 
franc, fifty centimes, No. 9999 will take me 
to any part of Paris, inside of the fortifica- 
tions, while for two francs he is my obe- 
dient cocher and will drive me during an 
entire hour wherever I would go. 

There is a law which limits the charges 
made by cab drivers, but No. 9999 and 1 
have a mutual understanding that quarter 
hours, and even halves, do not count in the 
final settlement, if I desire to dream a little 
over an old book-stall, or wish the horse to 
go no faster than a walk through the narrow 
streets of the Quartier Latin. 

We are great friends, — we three: the tall 
cocher with his bronzed face and small light- 
colored, sandy moustache; the wiry little 
black horse with a chopped-off tail; and my- 
self. The cocher wears a brown overcoat 
with a big circular cape, that flaps in the 




112 A Dreamer in Paris 

wind like the wings of an immense bird. 
On his head is a tall stove-pipe hat, made of 

glazed oil- 
cloth, and his 
feet, clothed 
with woolen 
stockings, fit 
loosely in two 
great wooden 
sabots. 

When I come around the corner of the 
Avenue d'Antin the little black horse catches 
the first sight of me, and throws up his 
head, champs his bit, and looks friendly all 
over his poor little body. I never before 
realized how much expression is contained 
in a horse's face, and especially in the face 
of a horse which has suffered. This creature 
with its bones protruding from every inch 
of its anatomy, — an old *" skate" of a horse, 
— would recognize me as soon as I turned 
the corner; and I imagined, at times, that he 
would think, in his horse way: "Here 



A Dreamer in Paris 1 1 3 

comes Easymark. Thank God! it will be a 
walk-over for me this morning." Then 1 
would go up to him and look into his great 
sorrowful brown eyes, while I stroked the 
tip of his velvety soft nose. " Poor horse, 
poor old fellow," I would say. ''And you, 
also, are one of the army of cripples!" I 
had imagined that it was only women and 
occasionally men who could hug sorrow and 
suffering so closely to their hearts that it 
became part of them and, forever after- 
ward, shone through their eyes. I remem- 
ber, on an occasion like this, the embar- 
rassed, shame-faced manner in which I 
cautioned Pierre, ihtcocher, to drive slowly; 
saying that I was not in a hurry and that I 
would pay him by the hour. The admonition 
was unnecessary for never was there a driver 
so careful of his beast. 

If we stopped for only a few moments, 
the little horse was carefully covered with 
the well-worn and frayed blanket, while 
Pierre would pace up and down on the cold 



114 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

sidewalk, his wooden shoes clicking at each 
step like castinets. 

While we three were good friends and had 
a great many things in common, we were, 
each one, by nature and circumstances, 
totally unlike. 

There was no sign of suffering about 
Pierre. He was one of those healthy indi- 
viduals with a smile that disclosed firm white 
teeth, and an expression of good-nature on 
his features which attracted a steady run of 
customers into his shabby old voiture. The 
poor little black horse was going all the time, 
from morning till evening, and that is the 
reason why its bones protruded and also why 
it became more sad and leg-weary, until 
finally one day it died, and I never saw the 
sad brown eyes again. Pierre's good-na- 
tured disposition had killed it! 



I don't like the new horse that No. 9999 
has. He is a big, long-legged sorrel with a 
vicious red eye and he has the pride of a 



A Dreamer in Paris 115 

horse of the Garde Municipal. Ill-temper 
and a wicked disposition are discernible in 
every movement of his body. I am not 
afraid of him, because he is a coward and 
shies at every turn and 
shadow on the road. 
He would not have the 
courage to run away, 
with Pierre on the 
box, but he is full of 
conceit and "cussed- 
ness," and I fear that 
it will tax Pierre's 
good-nature to the 
utmost limit to retain 
his customers. Our drives are no longer 
the placid, dreamy wanderings they used 
to be. This ungainly brute of a horse des- 
troys all chances of reverie. From the 
moment we start until our return the 
beast seems to be hunting trouble. He 
generally finds it, on the slippery pavements 
of Paris, and it takes all of Pierre's good- 




1 16 A Dreamer in Paris 

nature and ingenuity, and most of my 
patience, to get him on his feet again. 
There, too, when he falls down, he kicks 
and struggles, like a wild ass at the end of a 
rope, so that none dare go near him. At 
first I used to assist Pierre when these 
accidents occurred but the experience be- 
came so embarrassing by reason of the 
crowd of onlookers — all offering their pity 
and suggestions — that now I usually slink 
into the nearest cafe and pretend that it is no 
concern of mine. 



The days are becoming more bearable. 
We have had three months of cloudy 
weather and incessant rains, but now the 
sun will, occasionally, break through the 
clouds. The temptation is therefore great 
to go afoot, and in my rambles to get closer 
to the earth and the people. The grass is 
becoming green along the broad sweep of the 
Champs Elysees, and the spouting fountains 
in the circles are no longer incrusted with 



A Dreamer in Paris 117 

ice. I spent an hour to-day in the studio of 
a French artist. He is a painter, the son and 
the grandson of a painter. They were all 
born under the same roof in which is located 




the studio and therefore I had the oppor- 
tunity of conversing with one *'to the 
manner born." 

The studio was located on the sixth floor 
of a roomy old-fashioned house, and it taxed 
my heart and lungs to accomplish the task of 



1 1 8 A Dreamer in Paris 

climbing the apparently interminable stairs 
to it. Once inside, however, I was amply 
repaid for my labor, for the room was full 
of costly collections of paintings and curios, 
from little nothings and bits of color to the 
housings of a Venetian gondola which stood 
in the centre of the room in all its pristine 
ugliness. 



I shall never forget the acute feeling of 
disgust and disappointment which came 
over me when I took my first gondola ride 
in Venice. It began at the Railroad Station 
at the upper end of the Grand Canal and 
ended at the Grand Hotel. Our gondolier, 
habited as much like a New York stevedore 
as though they were brothers — he wore a 
very much soiled blue flannel shirt, nonde- 
script trousers, tucked in his boots, and 
broken suspenders — led us to his black 
hearse-like boat and, with much poling and 
sculling, took us through the vilest, worst 
smelling sewer— one of the smaller branch 



A Dreamer in Paris 



119 



canals, foul with floating garbage and worse 
— for nearly a mile, until we again entered 
the Grand Canal and proceeded to our 
destination. We were not allowed to land, 
however, until this pirate of a gondolier had 




extorted from us a substantial gratuity in 
addition to his regular fare. 

Oh! the dreams of our youth all silently 
fled. This canal, this reeking sluice and pool 
of corruption, is spanned by the *' Bridge of 
Sighs" and its poisonous flood stains the 
walls of the "Doge's Palace!" 

In those boyhood years I owned a few 
books and one in particular I treasured be- 
cause it contained numerous softly lined 



I20 A Dreamer in Paris 

plates, engravings of Venice, beautiful 
Venice, the Queen of the Adriatic. In later 
years I added another book to my library 
by Howells, and I used to dream over the 
page: — 

"The slumberous bells murmur to each 
other in the lagoons: the white sail faints 
into the white distance; the gondola slides 

athwart the sheeted silver of the bay " 

I dreamed and longed to see Venice. 



When I awoke the sun was shining 
pitilessly overhead and I was standing on 
the stone-paved Piazza of St. Mark's in the 
heart of Venice. Not a tree or a plant of 
any kind; no green shrub or flower tempered 
the merciless stoniness of the place. There, 
at one end of the square, was the gaudy 
facade of the Cathedral, and on both sides 
the arching arcades. 

A few hundred tourists of all nationalities 
drifted aimlessly back and forth across this 



A Dreamer in Paris 12 1 



stony waste, and some English girls were 
feeding a flock of tame pigeons. Then, I 
turned again, with an enlightened vision, to 
"Venetian Life" 
and read, with a 
clearer understand- 
ing, the soul's cry 
of the author: — 

"As I remember, 
we spent by far the 
greater part of our 
time in going to the 
Piazza. We went 
every evening to 
the Piazza as a mat- 
ter of course: if the morning was long we 
went to the Piazza: if we did not know 
what to do in the afternoon, we went to the 
Piazza: if we had friends with us we went 
to the Piazza. If we were alone we went to 
the Piazza " 

Then, while 1 pitied him for the sufferings 
that he had endured, 1 was in a measure 




122 A Dreamer in Paris 

comforted for I knew that Howells had been 
punished. 



My friend, the French painter, is a gentle- 
man of culture and refinement, but I am sur- 
prised to find how narrow is his horizon, 
and with what a carefully cultivated short- 
sightedness he views the outside world and 
the United States in particular. 

He has traveled in Italy and Spain in 
search of the romantic and the picturesque, 
and his studio is filled with sweet little *' bits "- 
of meadow lands, with cows; rivulets, with 
cows; hillsides, with cows; and occasion- 
ally a barnyard full of cows. When I asked 
him why he did not extend his travels across 
the ocean, and go to the United States for his 
scenic studies, he at once became hlasi sur 
tout and assumed a lofty condescension. He 
had been everywhere. What could he find in 
the States excepting a vast wilderness } and 
pictures of vast wildernesses would not sell in 



A Dreamer m Paris 123 



Paris! No doubt he is still painting meadows 
and streamlets, and dear little "bits" of cozy- 
corner scenery — to sell to rich Americans. 



I don't blame him. He takes his cue from 
the hundreds of American artists who are 
"abroad" every 
year, doing the 
same thing. 1 
ran across one 
at Nice, one hot 
day last month. 
Carrying a camp- 
stool, he had 
walked about 
two miles out 
on the road to 
Ville-Franche, to paint a picture of a very 
modern and ordinary-looking villa. 

I looked over his shoulder and saw nothing 
in his study that would localize the scene, 
nothing different from a dozen similar villas 




124 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

which onesees every day in the suburbs of any 
large American city. But he will catalogue 
that painting *' On the Road to Ville-Franche," 
or some similar foreign title, and Americans 
will bid for it until the price is sufficiently 
high to pay his expenses "abroad." 

These "bits" of things tire me; they are 
so scrappy. They are generally produced by 
artists who imagine that they have genius 
and who never did a day's hard work in 
their entire lives. If that artist on the road 
to Ville-Franche had turned his back toward 
the rear end of that very commonplace look- 
ing villa, and gazed out, over the harbor of 
Nice at sunset, he would have viewed a scene 
that is worth a whole season's painting — a 
scene that is worth while. 



On my return from my friend's studio, or 
atelier as it is called here, I came suddenly 
upon a mournful procession, the like of 
which can be seen every day in the streets of 



A 'Dreamer in Paris 125 

Paris, — a funeral. In this final ceremony the 
French people can teach much to the careless 
Americans. It is always more or less of a 
shock to me, at home, to see the indifferent, 
hustling way in which one's friends are hur- 
ried along the streets to the cemetery. I have 
frequently observed the free-born American 
driver of a carriage forming one of a funeral 
procession with his feet up on the dash- 
board and a cigar or a pipe in his mouth. A 
feeble attempt is made to dignify his bear- 
ing by putting on his head an antiquated high 
hat: but the effect is more ridiculous than 
seemly. 

Here, the cortege is marked by a decent ob- 
servance of formalities, both by the drivers 
and the attendants. A distinctive garment or 
regalia is worn by the men; and the horses 
are caparisoned in fitting cloths indicative 
of mourning. 

Not only the attendants and the mourners 
pay respect to the dead, but the street traffic 
is stopped, and the pedestrian stands on the 



126 A Dreamer in Paris 

sidewalk with uncovered head, until the sad 
little company has passed him. 



It was not always so in Paris. In the six- 
teenth century one reads that ''the dead 
were buried wherever it pleased the survi- 
vors to lay them. 
If you had a bit of 
garden or a court- 
yard attached to 
your house, you 
might make that 
your private burial- 
ground: if you had 
none, you might 
dig up six feet of 
the public thor- 
oughfare; or, if it 
were a better solace to give your dead the 
shelter of the dwelling he had been used to, 
there was nothing to prevent you from be- 
stowing him in the cellar. 




A Dreamer in Paris 127 

'* The era of burial in churches or in ceme- 
teries came with the finding of a treatise by 
St. Augustine, in which the Father main- 
tained that the dead derived much satisfac- 
tion and benefit from interment in the shadow 
of some sacred building, or in the near neigh- 
borhood of bones renowned for their sanctity. 
Hereupon, every one sought to be buried, if 
not beneath the flagstones of his favorite 
church, at least within its pious umbra: and 
so the cemetry grew up around the more 
famous temples of Paris." 



As the funeral procession passed me, I be- 
gan to wonder by what route the poor dead 
body would reach its final resting-place; for 
in this particular there is a wide range of selec- 
tion governed in most instances by the 
amount of earthly goods which it possessed 
when its spirit departed. If these were suf- 
ficiently numerous the cortege might take the 
road to Pere Lachaise where **all the tombs 
are hideous, all have exactly the same charac- 



128 A Dreamer in Paris 

teristics, and the chief of these is weight;" 
where "it is as if every family tried to pile 
as much stone, granite or marble as possible 
upon their lost relatives." If the corpse is 
the body of a poor man, his relatives can, 
for 500 francs, purchase a space of twenty- 
two and a half feet— square feet — not quite 
four feet by six feet, called a concession a 
perpituiU, in which to dig a grave, that will 
remain undisturbed — until a new boulevard 
is built. One hundred and fifty francs is 
paid for a concession temporaire, which pro- 
vides that the grave shall be undisturbed for 
a period of ten years. 

Pere Lachaise, was the Jesuit Superior in 
the time of Louis XIV, and the land now oc- 
cupied by the cemetery formerly belonged 
to his order. It was sold and converted into 
a public cemetery in 1804. 

** Le P^re Lachaise, a la bonne heure! Ure 
enterri au Pdre Lachaise, c'est comme avoir 
les meubles en acajou. LiUgance se recon- 
nait Id.." 



A 'Dreamer in Paris 129 

On the other side, — outside the city walls, 
at St. Ouen and Ivry, — the very poor are 
burled gratuitously and are laid in Fosses 
Communes, containing forty or fifty coffins 
each. 

It is comforting to think that the rich in 
Pere Lachaise with their meubles en acajou 
and the poor in Ivry laid in the Fosses Com- 
munes know nothing, feel nothing, care 
nothing, one way or the other. 



For a city that is supposed to be given up 
to playfulness and gaiety, a city that amuses 
itself by day and by night, I have yet to see 
a place where there are so few idlers. In 
Paris, industry is a religion. There is no 
squalor or slums, no such frightful contrasts 
as between the rich who live on Fifth Avenue 
in New York, and the poor who live in the 
* • east side " tenements. The nervous energy 
of the French is never exhausted in ceaseless 
endeavor. They seem to have a passion for 



130 A Dreamer in Paris 



occupation, for work of some kind. I have 
never seen the type "loafer" in Paris. The 
inane creature who hangs around street cor- 
ners, staring at passing women and chewing 
tobacco, belongs to the English and the 
American cities. In even the poorest quar- 
ters of Paris there is con- 
stant activity and move- 
ment. The men are always 
at work and so are the 
women. The ^ow//^ watch- 
ing her infant charge in the 
public gardens is always 
knitting. The nearest ap- 
proach to a loafer is the 
red-legged soldier who is 
her constant attendant. 1 
can forgive this fellow his 
idle hours for I know that 
his lines are laid in rough places and that his 
discipline is severe. He is only a boy — this 
member of the Garde Nationale — and, boy- 
like, he is always in evidence. One can see 




A Dreamer in Paris 131 

him in the gardens, in the streets, in the omni- 
buses and street cars ; one tumbles over him on 
every corner, at all hours of the day and night. 
He is like the historic yellow dog at a circus, 
chased from one side of the ring to the 
other. Some day he will join his brother 
Jacques and turn on his masters with brist- 
ling teeth— as the yellow dog has been 
known to do,— and then Jacques will upset 
his cart in the middle of the street— to help 
in the formation of a barricade — and he will 
take off his collar and play, roughly, for 
awhile,— until he is coaxed back into harness. 



1 like to know what Frenchmen think of 
Paris. We have the ideas of the English and 
the Irish, who generally take themselves too 
seriously; and we also have the rosy vapor- 
ings of immature youths who conceive Paris 
to be an immense merry-go-round, a vast 
pleasure-house filled with cheap fun and con- 
cert saloons. 

There is more or less of this sort of thing 



132 A Dreamer in Paris 

in summer — too much, in fact. Paris in 
July turns itself loose because the fashionable 
and the exclusive are no longer in evidence. 
At this time of the year *'all Paris" is sea- 
bathing, "all Paris" is watering. Ihthabituis 
of first night orchestra chairs, have heard 
the mandate to pack their baggage. The 
well known residents of the boulevards 
and most of the official set have left the city. 
Perhaps three or four thousand in "all Paris" 
have gone. That leaves a boisterous remnant 
of probably three million souls who are de- 
termined to make the best of it! 

A member of the '' can't-get-away" club 
laments: — "If only our poor city had the 
monopoly of, it makes no difference what, 
drink; of a specific so odious and so hurtful 
that it imbibes to exist, as saith Geoffroy in the 
Panache, of *a water that stinks,' whatever 
it be, they would come there from one end 
of the world to the other, and what a won- 
derful watering place we would have here, 
without being condemned to live in those lit- 



A Dreamer in Paris 133 



tie wooden boxes, imprisoned between two 
mountains, broiled by a pitiless sun, or at 
some little seaside resort, where one listens 
regularly, twice a v 

day to the cornet (1^^,^^ ffft 
soloist who plays 
the variations on 
Hayden! What 
mortals! 

''Even at this 
period condemned 
by the chronical 
elegant, one is not 
wearied, there is not yet too many in Paris, 
and the evening passes at least as easily as at 
some unimportant town on the coast of Nor- 
mandy. 

" Toward seven o'clock one goes to dine at 
Ambassadeur's. Down below, on the plat- 
form of the Champs Elysees, the serious 
stomachs; up above, on the terraces, the 
gay stomachs. One chooses without hesita- 
tion the terraces. 




134 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

"The little tables, pressing closely one 
against the other bring together unex- 
pected neighbors. One finds there, almost 
daily, what we call the pleasure-seeking 
public. 

"A few of all in this public, who meet at 
every moment, are known to one another by 
name. They are never out of one another's 
sight for twenty-four hours since they follow, 
step by step, the restaurants, concerts, re- 
unions of every kind which to them are in- 
dicative of the Parisian god which is called, — 
Fete. 

"There are within, there, the sons of fam- 
ilies and of comedians out of employment, 
the gentlemen of great houses and the jobber 
in chestnuts, the short story writer and the 
scion of a noble name; an intermingling of 
all the singular types, special fruits of the 
boulevard, who live dear, who love dear and 
who play dear, without having any well de- 
fined revenue or profession. 

"As a background to the picture, several of 



A Dreamer in Paris 135 



these good strangers — there they are, the rich 
foreigners! — the correctly dressed EngUsh- 
man in his everlasting gray suit, the Ameri- 
can all sparkling with jewelry, because there 
is one thing remarkable, and that is, when 
the Parisian pre- 
tends to leave 
Paris, the for- 
eigners enter 
there. Most of 
these gentle- 
manly exotics 
understand noth- 
ing of the merry 
jests which are 
repeated below 
but still they applaud boldly, while they 
accompany,— with loud laughter, and noisy 
clicking of knife on plate,— keeping time to 
the refrains of a polka de Fahrbach! " 




It is well to see ourselves as Frenchmen see 
us. It is the better way to learn about France 



136 A Dreamer in Paris 

through French authors. Taine says: — '* To 
find a people with a grand and complete 
literature is rare: there are few nations who 
have, during their whole existence, really 
thought and written. Among the ancients, 
the Latin literature was worth nothing at the 
outset, then it borrowed and became imita- 
tive. Among the moderns, German litera- 
ture does not exist for nearly two centuries 
— 1 550 to 1750; Italian literature and Spanish 
literature end at the middle of the seven- 
teenth century. Only ancient Greece, 
modern France and England, offer a 
complete series of great significant monu- 
ments." 

From the beginning the French writers 
have moulded history and events with a 
force more powerful than the belching of 
cannon or musketry. The incisive attacks, 
on the church and nobles by the French 
authors, — made toward the close of the 
eighteenth century — cut deeper than the 
swords of the National Guard. Such writers 



A Dreamer in Paris 137 



as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, 
D'Alembert, all contributed in an extraordi- 
nary degree toward the calling together of 
the States General, the formation of the 
National Assembly and the subsequent Rev- 
olution. 



^ 



How many Americans know that Lafay- 
ette was chosen first Captain of the National 
Guard? How 
many realize the 
fact that the French 
nation was suffer- 
ing from the crush- 
ing evils of arbitrary 
and unfair taxation 
from which they re- 
volted almost simul- 
taneously with the 
American Colonies ? 
How many remember the fact that in seven- 
teen hundred and eighty-nine was inaugu- 




138 A Dreamer in Paris 

rated our first President, George Washington ? 
Seventeen hundred and eighty-nine — the 
year that " ushers in all modern thought, life 
and action," — the year in which the Bastille 
was stormed and destroyed, and Paris was in 
the hands of the people! 

From my corner in the cafe, in the Rue St. 
Honore, I watch the people, the courteous 
good-natured French people, and I want to 
shake hands with them, and call them 
brothers— when 1 think of the year 1789. 
And then a flood of thought comes over 
me, and I mentally shrink from contact with 
natures that are at times so amiable, so cat- 
like, so ferocious. 

"On Friday, July 17th, the king — Louis 
XVI— set out from Versailles, at nine o'clock 
in the morning. His guard was composed 
only of the bourgeois militia of Versailles. 
The National Assembly went to meet His 
Majesty before the hall, and the deputation 



A Dreamer in Paris 139 

appointed to accompany him prepared to 
follow. A very considerable number of the 
members of the Assembly, consulting only 
their zeal and fidelity, came to increase still 
more the corUge, and weakened a little the 
lively alarm with which the queen and the 
royal family were tormented. This alarm was 
doubtless very natural: no one could think 
without shuddering of the dangers the king 
ran, carried by his confidence and love for 
his people into the midst of a mad multitude, 
stained with so many crimes, and already 
accustomed to blood." 

And then Bertrand de Moleville adds: 
"Even its joy was so ferocious." He knew 
his countrymen only too well. 

"The Horse-guards led the way: they 
were followed by the French guards, pre- 
ceded by the cannons and the flag of the 
Bastille; the members of the Assembly, filing 
off two and two, and forming a double 
column, followed, and after them the in- 
fantry of the bourgeois militia. A numer- 




140 A Dreamer in Paris 

ous detachment of volunteer cavalry pre- 
ceded M. de la Fayette, who, as commander, 
was on horseback in the middle of the cor- 
/^^^, with a naked sword in his hand. The 
Paris guards, the band of the 
town-guard, the fish-women, 
clothed in white, adorned with 
ribbons of the colors of the 
national cockade, and carrying 
in their hands flowers and 
Louis XVI branches of laurel, took part 
in this escort up to the king's carriage. 

*'The king was received at the barrier of 
the Conference by the municipal body. M. 
Bailly as mayor, performing the functions of 
provost, presented the keys of the town to 
His Majesty in a silver bason, and addressed 
this speech to him : — 

" * Sire, — I bring Your Majesty the keys of 
your good town of Paris; they are the same 
as were presented to Henry IV; he had 
reconquered his people; here, it is the 
people who have reconquered their king. 



A 'Dreamer in Paris 141 

Your Majesty comes to rejoice in the peace 
that you have reestablished in your capital; 
you come to rejoice in the love of your 
faithful subjects; it is for their happiness that 
Your Majesty has assembled around you the 
representatives of the nation, and that, with 
them, you are about to occupy yourself in 
laying the foundations of liberty and public 
prosperity. What a memorable day is this, 
when Your Majesty has come to preside in 
person in the midst of this united family, 
when you have been led back to your palace 
by the whole National Assembly, guarded 
by the representatives of the nation thronged 
by an immense multitude! 

" * Sire, neither your people, nor Your Maj- 
esty, will ever forget this great day: it is the 
grandest of the monarchy: it is the epoch of 
an august and eternal alliance between the 
monarch and the people. I have seen this 
grand day: and, as if all happiness were 
made for me, the first duty of the office to 
which the vote of my fellow-citizens has ap- 



142 A 'Dreamer in Paris 

pointed me is to bear to you the expression 
of their respect and love.'" 

The velvet paw of the Parisian tiger was 
caressing its victim. Its deviUsh insin- 
cerity was so manifest that the king was 
nearly overcome with grief. De Moleville 
says: — 

'•The sadness that so revolting a reception 
produced in the heart of this unhappy mon- 
arch was depicted on his countenance in so 
touching a manner, that no one could look at 
him without emotion." 

When the king departed from Paris "the 
Parisians, beside themselves with gratitude 
and love, were not contented with surround- 
ing the king's carriage; they cHmbed up in 
crowds behind, on the coachman's seat, on 
the steps, and even on the top. Still some 
cries of ' Long live the Nation and Liberty!' 
were heard. But the cries of ' Long Hve our 
King, our Friend, our Father!' were a thou- 
sand times more numerous." 

These playful Parisian children could not 



A Dreamer in Paris 143 

contain themselves for joy; they bubbled 
over with happiness and innocent merriment. 

rib 

Barante gives us the sequel: "Such a 
story can have no other historian than the 
only witness who has survived for a long 
succession of miseries. ' We found my 
father — the king — much changed. He wept 
over us from grief, but not from fear of 
death; he described his trial to my mother, 
excusing the ruffians who were causing his 
death, ... he replied: "Farewell!" He 
pronounced this farewell in such a touch- 
ing tone that the sobs increased and 
Madame Royale fainted at the king's feet. 
He pressed them again to his heart, and tore 
himself from their embraces. "Farewell! 
farewell!" he said, as he returned to his 
room. "Ah, monsieur, what an interview," 
said he, as he met the Abbe Edgeworth. 
"Why must I love so much, and be so ten- 
derly loved?" . . . The morning after the 
king exclaimed, "My God, how happy 1 am 



144 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

in having preserved my religion. What 
should I be now without it? With it death 
seems sweet to me. Yes, there is an in- 
corruptible Judge on high, who will grant me 
the justice that men refuse me here below." 
. . . The day began to dawn ; they heard the 
drums beat to call the men to arms. " It is 
doubtless the National Guard assembling," 
said the king. Soon he distinguished the 
feet of horses in the court. •* They are com- 
ing near," he said, with the same composure. 
... At nine o'clock the doors were opened 
with a great noise: Santerre entered, fol- 
lowed by a numerous train. " You come for 
me } " said the king. •* Yes," replied Santerre. 
. . . The day was foggy, dark, and cold: a 
gloomy silence reigned as the carriage passed 
along. The shops were closed; nobody ap- 
peared at the windows. The king was 
reading the prayers for the dying.' " 

An hour later the Parisian tiger was lapping 
the blood of its latest victim. 



A Dreamer in Paris 145 

With the story of the unfortunate Louis 
XVI crowding my memory, I visited the 
palace of Versailles, which was his constant 
abode until he was taken to Paris, and stood 
in the bed-chamber in which M. de Breze 
came to announce the re- 
fusal of the deputies to dis- 
perse, and the memorable 
words of Mirabeau, "We 
are here by the will of the 
people, and we will disperse 
only at the point of the ^'''^'''' 

bayonet." Adjoining the bed-chamber is the 
little ante-chamber where Louis XVI and his 
queen Marie Antoinette used to dine in public 
on Sundays. ''The public dinner was an old 
tradition of the French court. The people 
had the privilege of strolling through the palace 
pretty much as they pleased at the dinner hour, 
and of staring at majesty as it fed. The cus- 
tom was a nuisance or otherwise, according 
to the view that majesty might take." Marie 
Antoinette, often as she dined in public, de- 




146 A Dreamer in Paris 

tested it cordially, and ate but a mouthful 
until she had retired to her own apartments. 

"Anybody decently dressed was allowed 
in," says Madame Campan, *'and at dinner- 
time you would find the stairs crowded with 
honest folk, who, when they had seen the 
Dauphine eat her soup, would go to watch 
the princes at their bouilli, and then hurry 
off to see mesdames at dessert. It is a spec- 
tacle which particularly delights the country 
cousin." 

"Casanova was a privileged spectator on 
an occasion when the queen dined alone. As 
she took her seat, a dozen courtiers ranged 
themselves in a semicircle some ten paces 
from the table. Her Majesty ate with her 
eyes fixed on her plate, and took no notice of 
any one until a dish was brought on which 
seemed to please her. Then she looked up 
for a moment, and glanced around the circle, 
apparently seeking some one to whom she 
might communicate her satisfaction. Pres- 
ently she found him and said: 



A Dreamer in Paris 147 



" * M. de Lowenthal!' 

"A very grand-looking man stepped from 
the circle, bowed, and said: 

"•Madame?' 

"M believe, Monsieur,' said 
Her Majesty, 'that this is a 
fricassee of chicken.' 

" • I believe so. Your Majesty.' 

" This response uttered in the 
gravest tone imaginable, M. de 
Lowenthal stepped backward 
into the circle, and the queen 
finished her dinner without another word." 
Was it any wonder that this young queen 
broke loose occasionally from such intolera- 
ble stupidity and, after the manner of her 
sex, pretended to more gaiety than she was 
permitted to enjoy. 




Marie 
Antoinette 



^ 



What was the cause of the French Rev- 
olution ? In the "Story of a Peasant," 
Erckmann-Chatrain makes Chauvel say: — 



148 A Dreamer in Paris 

" In 1789 France was divided into three or- 
ders — the nobility, the clergy, and the peo- 
ple, or the Third Estate. The first two 
orders possessed all the property, all the 
benefices, and all the honors, and you, the 
last order— a hundred times more numerous 
than both the others together — you had all 
the expenses and all the distress; you can 
recollect what you endured in those times; 
the taxes which weighed you down, the out- 
rages you had to suffer, and the horrors of 
famine which reduced you to despair." 

I wish to remember all of that; to paste it 
in my mental scrap-book, to refer to, occa- 
sionally, when I find myself getting maud- 
lin over the last hours of kings and queens, 
princes and nobles. 

The thought occurs to me at such times it 
was fortunate for George III of England that 
three thousand miles of the stormy Atlantic 
Ocean rolled between him and the American 
"rebels," during the year of grace 1782. 
That was a turbulent period for **the peo- 



A Dreamer in Paris 149 

pie " on both sides of the globe, and the 
taste for kingly blood became omnivorous. 
That was the time when the spirit of liberty 
in France drew close to its affinity inde- 
pendence in America — when Mercy and 
Truth kissed each other, and friendship first 
began. 

1 desire to be on good terms with the 
English people. 1 should like to forget the 
abominable and revolting features of the war 
in which they ravaged us by the use of mer- 
cenaries and Indians. The "young giant of 
the West," as Bismarck called us, can afford 
to forgive a past injustice, but may we cease 
to be a nation of freemen when we forget 
the time " the French Government recog- 
nized the United States as an independent 
nation;" when, " by a treaty offensive and 
defensive, the two nations bound themselves 
to fight together for that independence, 
neither to conclude a separate peace." 



150 A Dreamer in Paris 

I grew eloquent as we discussed this sub- 
ject in the corner of a cafe, opposite the 
Gare Montparnesse. What a curious com- 
pany we were. How oddly assorted. An 
Englishman, an Australian, a German free- 
thinker, a French artiste, an ex-cowboy from 
our own breezy plains, a man from Ohio, 
and a dreamer from Philadelphia. 

The Australian with his colonial fidelity to 
Great Britain asserted that England was in- 
volved in four wars at the same time, and 
that the French Government simply revenged 
itself on England by lending us money and 
supplies. The Englishman thought so too, 
but the German freethinker was most exas- 
perating when he lighted a cigarette, and, 
bending over the little table, puffed the 
smoke in my face, and asked me if I knew 
that there was a map still in existence, on 
which the representatives of Spain and 
France had marked our western boundary at 
—Pittsburg! 

The Frenchman politely shrugged his 



A Dreamer in Paris 151 

shoulders. ** Mon Dieii ! we did not want ze 
countree. It is too many miles afar off " 

I urged him to go on. 

** M. Lafayette put ze M. Cornwailis in ze 
cul-de-sac at Yorktown, all vis ze Frenchman 
soldats ; and ven he come out by ze vater he 
could not, for ze Frenchman ships, vis M. 
De Grasse, he vas in ze rivUre Saint Jacques 
— Hein!" 

We all laughed. The cowboy grasped 
the artiste by the hand with a grip that made 
him wince. 

"You're damned right!" he said, cor- 
dially. ''1 remember reading about that, — 
out on the ranch. Let me think for a mo- 
ment. It was in a geography book, or his- 
tory, or something! " 



In my heart I think that Benjamin Franklin 
landed in France when the time was propi- 
tious, a time when Paris was ready for a new 
sensation. In those days "the name of a 




152 A Dreamer in Paris 

man was a recommendation. In these days 
success depends upon the names of things." 
Franklin, the American 
politician, scientific dis- 
coverer, and author, one 
of the signers of the Declar- 
ation of Independence, be- 
came popular in much the 
Franklin ^^^^ fashion as did Mesmer 
a few years later. For a period of time 
the Parisians were captivated by the genial 
old man, of whom Madame de Cregny 
said: "That which I saw most remarkable 
in him was his mode of eating eggs. He 
emptied five or six into a goblet, mingling 
salt, pepper and butter, and thus made a joli 
ragoM philadelphique. He cut with his 
knife the pieces of melon he wished to eat; 
and he bit the asparagus, in place of cutting 
off the point with his knife on the plate, and 
eating it properly with a fork. You perceive 
it was the mode of a savage!" Rich and 
poor alike lived in an atmosphere d la Frank- 



A Dreamer in Parts 153 

lin, which the French Government was in a 
measure compelled to breathe also. The re- 
sult was an imposing ''Treaty of Peace," 
signed, for England, by David Hartley, and, 
for the United States, by John Adams, B. 
Franklin, and John Jay. 

This was " Done at Paris this third day of 
September. In the year of our Lord one thou- 
sand seven hundred and eighty-three." 



Then Paris was ready for the next sensa- 
tion. "They had lost all interest in ques- 
tions of national import, and a new opera 
was to them of more moment than a treaty 
of peace with England or the recognition of 
the independence of the United States. War 
had formerly been a serious occupation for 
the French people; but now the only war 
in which they were engaged was in America, 
where the people fought for what they called 
'independence,' and what the French call by 
the more abstract word ' liberty.' And even 




154 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

this distant war— this war carried on not 
only in another country, but in another world 
— had come to an end. All things consid- 
ered, was it not better worth while to give 
attention to Mesmer — that German doctor, 
who, for the second time 
within six years, created an 
excitement in France— than to 
Lord Cornwallis or Monsieur 
Washington who were so far 
Mesmer away that probably the people 

of Paris would never see either of them? 
Mesmer was there; they could see him, touch 
him, and — supreme ambition of three quar- 
ters of Paris — could be touched by him. 

" And so this man, who on his arrival in 
Paris had not been sustained by any one, not 
even by the queen, his compatriot, who 
aided so willingly those who came from her 
country; this man, who but for Doctor 
Deslon who betrayed him would have re- 
mained in obscurity, — this man reigned su- 
premely over public opinion, leaving far 



A Dreamer in Paris 155 

behind the king, of whom the public had 
never talked, Monsieur de Lafayette, of whom 
they did not yet talk, and Monsieur Necker, 
of whom they talked no longer." 



I closed the book impatiently, and blew 
out the light of my tallow candle. '*Bah! 
Friendship indeed!" I muttered from be- 
neath my ample bed-coverings, " Franklin- 
ism and Mesmerism! Suppose that the lat- 
ter had arrived first in Paris. Then Franklin 
would have been too late, the American 
Revolution might have failed! Think of it. 
If Franklin had not reached Paris ahead of 
Doctor Mesmer we might all have been born 
British * subjects '—like the Canadians!" 



I pass by the Tomb of Napoleon day by 
day, and seldom enter it. The place is so 
profoundly depressing and my spirit is so 
antagonistic to the memory of the departed 



156 A Dreamer in Paris 

''genius" that I hesitate and pause on the 
threshold of the old church. 

At the entrance to the crypt is a bronze 
door, above which, on a tablet, is the follow- 
ing extract from Napoleon's will: "I desire 
that my ashes may rest on the banks of the 
Seine, in the midst of the French people 
whom I have loved so well." 

I recall the remark of the Irish author: 
** The very thing that nearly ruined her," — 
and am silent. 

From the sunny side of the Hotel des In- 
valides 1 can lazily view the majestic edifice 
with its wide frontage and enormous gilded 
dome : and I feel that the French people whom 
Napoleon said he 'Moved so well," have been 
very generous and forgiving. 

I do not know a subject on which the 
usually talkative French people — at least all I 
have met — are so uniformly and studiously 
silent. The present generation of those 
whom Napoleon designated as "crack- 
brained Royalists" are equally reserved 



A Dreamer in Paris 157 

as are the descendants of the "Jacobins." 
I understand that under the Restoration 
the words Emperor, Empire, and Bonaparte 
were no longer uttered in good society, 
but France is now a Republic and men 
can talk freely. To be sure, there is a 
regular army of from forty to fifty thou- 
sand troops within easy distance of Paris, 
that can be called upon in case the talking 
becomes too strenuous, — but one never 
thinks of that. 



The sun shines brightly to-day and the air 
is fresh and invigorating. Across the broad 
square are passing vehicles of every descrip- 
tion. A corporal's guard of soldiers comes 
marching down the avenue at a quickstep. 
They are exercising in the genial warmth 
of the rare sunshine. Just opposite, in 
solemn state, rest the ashes of Napoleon! 

I can see him through the eyes of Madame 
de Remusat. "Low statured and ill pro- 



158 A 'Dreamer in Paris 

portioned. Thin chestnut hair. Eyes of 
grayish blue. Skin a dead white without 
any color. Mouth thin-lipped. Teeth regu- 
lar. Chin short and his jaws heavy and 
square. 

"In his youth he was a 
dreamer; later in life he be- 
came moody, and later still 
an habitually ill-tempered 
man. He was deficient in 
education and manners. He 
Napoleon ^id not know how either to 
enter or to leave a room: he did not know 
how to make a bow, how to rise, or how 
to sit down. He had an habitual slight 
stoop." 

That was Napoleon Bonaparte the 
man. 

" At a fete given by the city of Paris to 
Napoleon the Emperor, the repertory of 
laudatory inscriptions being exhausted, a 
brilliant device was resorted to. Over the 
throne which he was to occupy were placed 




A Dreamer in Paris 159 



the following words from the Holy Scrip- 
tures, in letters of gold; 

" ' I AM THAT I AM,' 

and no one seemed to be scandalized! " 



To-day my promenade took me through the 
Jardin des Tuileries 
and I tried to re- 
build the palace in 
my imagination; 
but a crowd of 
youths at play 
jostled and surged 
around me, under 
the direction of a 
mild-looking tutor, 
and 1 continued 
across the bridge 
and along thebanks 
of the Seine. A 
cold north wind 

was blowing and I noticed two old book- 
lovers intently absorbed oyer a purchase 




i6o A Dreamer in Paris 

from the book-stalls. Further down the 
river I crossed again and stood in front of 
Notre Dame. 

The old pile was dreary and deserted, 
and I was benumbed with the cold, but 1 
had an object in visiting Notre Dame, this 
second of December; for on this day — 
nearly one hundred years ago — and at this 
same hour the coronation of Napoleon took 
place. 

Even the weather to-day is as it was then, 
"cold, but dry and bright," and I can 
imagine the Christian fortitude of the Pope, 
who had preceded the emperor by several 
hours, and who sat in the penetrating cold 
of Notre Dame awaiting his arrival. I was 
in the atmosphere of the place and absorbed 
the local coloring until my teeth chattered 
and warning twinges of rheumatism inter- 
fered with the pleasure of my day-dream. 

It is so much easier and more comfortable 
to read of events from the vantage ground 
of one's own library that I often wonder 




s 



Ue ipalaia De JvlbUcc 



i Dreamer in Pari. 



ts 



nom the boo^ • •- --^ther down the 
river I crosse; itood in front of 

Notre Dat;:. 

The o;;i r- :-id deserted, 

and 1 sva-- ■ uie cold, but I 

had 'an o^ '-lotre Dame, this 

>econ- , ' this day — 

nearly one iiundred ye^^rs iigo— and at this 
same hour the coronir-'"" ■ * '^<^;ipoleon took 
place, 

Ev€ ;ather to-day is as it was then, 

'■cold, Dui dry^^i^«€!:)^%MmQrn3liri can 
imagine t! ^ iti.uie of the Pope, 

who had r.^i'or by several 

hours, and ,:etrating cold 

lis arrival. I was 
:X\ tile atmospheric oi the place and absorbed 
the local coloring until my teeth chattered 
and warning twinges of rheumatism inter- 
fered with the pleasure of my day-dream. 

It is so much easier and more comfortable 
to read of events from the vantage ground 
of one's own library that 1 often wonder 



A 'Dreamer in Paris i6i 

what demon of unrest compelled me to 
wander three thousand miles away from it. 
These thoughts possessed me as I stood in 
front of Notre Dame and gazed down the 
street anxiously expecting the emperor's car- 
riage. 



*' It was a magnificent affair — it had seven 
glasses and was gorgeously gilded — and in 
it were the Emperor with his wife and his 
two brothers Joseph and Louis." It was 
followed by other carriages containing the 
"court" that had been created by "Citizen 
Bonaparte." "There was no lack of shout- 
ing as the corUge proceeded at a foot-pace 
to Notre Dame; and, although the acclama- 
tions of the people had not that ring of 
enthusiasm which a sovereign jealous of his 
people's love longs to recognize, they 
suffice to gratify the vanity of a haughty 
master, but one who was not sensitive." 

We are told by an eye-witness that 
Napoleon wore " a French coat of red velvet 



1 62 A Dreamer in Paris 

embroidered in gold, a white sash, a short 
cloak sewn with bees, a plumed hat turned 
up in front with a diamond buckle, and the 
collar of the Legion of Honor in diamonds." 
"On his arrival at Notre Dame the em- 
peror entered the archiepiscopal palace, and 
there assumed his robes of state made of 
purple velvet sewn with golden bees. They 
seemed almost to crush him : his slight frame 
collapsed under the enormous mantle of 
ermine. A simple laurel wreath of gold, like 
that of the Caesars, encircled his head ; he 
looked like an antique medallion, but he was 
extremely pale and genuinely affected. The 
expression of his countenance was stern and 
somewhat distressed." 



On the corner opposite is a small cafe and 
1 entered it to obtain something hot ; the cold 
was most penetrating. 

It was a very little room, barely large 
enough to accommodate four or five persons 
comfortably. A diminutive counter faced 



A Dreamer in Paris 163 

me, as I entered the door, and behind that 
sat the always present ** Madame," who pre- 
sided over the establishment. At a table in 
the corner were four men who were smoking 
cigarettes and sipping a weak solution of 
peppermint. There was barely room for me 
to open the door and squeeze my bulky 
form between the counter and the table. 

I wanted a glass of whiskey but 1 knew 
at a glance that there was none in the place. 
One can obtain that stimulant only at the 
most pretentious cafes of the boulevards, — 
and even there the raw Canadian stuff is 
generally offered for American whiskey. 

I often wondered where the Canadians 
secured a market for their whiskey, and found 
it in France and Italy. It is always sold under 
the enticing sign, "American Bar." I advise 
my countrymen to beware of all such. 

I found myself facing madame and vainly 
searching the labels on the rows of bottles be- 
hind her for some familiar brand. There 
was nothing in sight but Benedictine, and for 



164 A Dreamer in Parts 

five sous she filled for me a glass somewhat 
larger than a thimble. It was sweet and 
spicy, but not particularly invigorating, and 
I went away feeling as though I had taken 
a spoonful of medicated syrup. 



Returning to Notre Dame I entered the 
door and waving aside the officious little 
English guide I dropped a handful of 
coppers into the emaciated hand of an old 
priest, and moved on into the shadow of one 
of the ancient pillars. 

They say that the coronation ceremony was 
grand and impressive. 

" A general movement of admiration was 
noticeable at the moment when the empress 
was crowned. She was so unaffected, so 
graceful, as she advanced toward the altar; she 
knelt down with such simple elegance, that 
all eyes were delighted with the picture she 
presented." 



A Dreamer in Paris 165 

I walked over to the central isle and stood 
on the exact spot where Josephine had knelt. 



" When she had to walk from the altar to 
the throne, there was a slight altercation with 
her sisters-in-law, who carried her mantle 
with such an ill grace that I observed at one 
moment the new-made empress could not 
advance a step. The emperor perceived 
this, and spoke a few short sharp words to 
his sisters, which speedily brought them to 
reason. 

** During the ceremony, the Pope bore an 
air of resignation of a noble sort, the result 
of his own will, and for a purpose of great 
utility. 

"It was between two and three o'clock 
when the corUge left Notre Dame, and we 
did not reach the Tuileries until the short 
December day had closed in." 



At the same hour, on the same day of the 



1 66 A Dreamer in Paris 

month but nearly a hundred years afterward, 
I followed the route taken by the cortige 
back to the Tuileries, and from there to the 
lofty height of my little room in the Rue 
la Boetie. 



The first idea was that the Pope should 
place the diadem upon the head of the 
emperor : but Bonaparte refused 
to receive the crown from any 
hand but his own, and uttered 
on that occasion the sentence 
which Mme. de Stael has quoted 
in her work: "I found the 
Mme.de Stael ^^^^^ of France upon the 

ground, and I picked it up." 




Last night, while 1 was still breathing the 
Napoleonic atmosphere I picked up a book by 
the authors Erckmann-Chatrain and read 
about the "poor devils from Mayence! poor 
generals of the army of the North, of the 



A 'Dreamer in Paris 167 

Sambre and the Meuse, of the Rhine and the 
Moselle, of the Pyrenees, of La Vendee, of 
everywhere, how many actions, how many 
battles did you fight in '92, '93, '94, '95 under 
much more serious and more terribly dan- 
gerous circumstances than those fought in 
Italy! But, nevertheless, it was you, yes, 
and all of us, who might 
boast of having saved the 
country several times by 
having saved it through the 
greatest sufferings, with- 
out coats, without shoes, 
almost without bread, and Kl'eber 

not one among us, not one of our leaders, 
brave, steadfast and honest as they were, ever 
received a thousandth part of the honors be- 
stowed upon Bonaparte. The country had 
no worship, no enthusiasm but for one man. 
It is not enough to do one's duty, the great 
affair is to call out, and to make a hundred 
gazettes call out — M have done this I I have 
done that! I said so and so! lam such a one! 




1 68 A Dreamer in Paris 

I am the clever man! It is I who send you 
colors, millions, pictures, etc. ! ' And then 
a list is made out of what has 
been sent of guns and tro- 
phies: and then again to repeat 
to one's soldiers, * You are the 
finest soldiers in the world!' 
which of course makes men 
Jour an ^^^ mentally, * And you the 
greatest general.' Ah, what a comedy it all 
is! — the big drum, the fifes, gold lace and 
plumes, fine means to catch Frenchmen." 




tff 



My stump of a candle spluttered feebly 
and went out. Perforce I closed the book and 
fell asleep humming the lines: 

I am the Captain of the Pinafore. 

Chorus : And a right good captain too. 

You're very, very good and be it understood, I 
command a right good crew. 

Chorus : We're very, very good and be it under- 
stood, he commands a right good crew. 




A Dreamer in Paris 169 

" Bonaparte always filled the newspapers! 
He was a man who well knew what it was 
to advertise! With his solitary Italian cam- 
paign he made more stir than all our other 
generals together, with their 
campaigns of the North, the 
South, of Germany, Cham- 
pagne Vendee, and Holland, 
since the beginning of the 
Revolution." 

"Glory was to be found 
under the Republic when Jourdan, Hoche, 
Kleber, and Marceau sacrificed themselves 
with thousands of others for 
liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity. They asked neither 
for titles, nor decorations, nor 
great pensions, nor gratifica- 
tions." Marceau 

I will extend my promenade to-day to the 
Place des Invalides and take another look at 
Napoleon's tomb — from the outside. 




lyo A Dreamer in Paris 

In the evening I began to read the con- 
clusion of the whole matter. 

"I must bring this long story to an end. I 
pass over the peace of Amiens, which was 
only a suspension of arms, as was every 
peace under Bonaparte: over the concordat, 
where the First Consul reestablished bishops, 
religious orders, taxes for the church, every- 
thing that the Revolution had abolished, and 
which was worth, to him, his coronation by 
Pie VII at Paris. Then he really believed 
himself Charlemagne! Nor will we mention 
the terrible struggle between France and 
England, in which Bonaparte, in trying to 
ruin England, reduced us all, us and our 
allies, to the greatest distress; nor of the bat- 
tles which followed one another, week after 
week, without ever ending; nor of the Te 
Deums for Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram, the 
Moskowa, etc. Napoleon Bonaparte was 
master; he took two or three hundred 
thousand men every year; he returned to our 
former conscriptions, he levied taxes, estab- 



A Dreamer in Paris 171 

lished monopolies, made proclamations, call- 
ing us 'his people! ' he wrote articles for the 
newspapers, issued decrees from the depths 
of Russia to organize the Theatre-Fran^ais — 
in fact, it was one great comedy! " 



There seems to be an unwritten law in 
Paris that all fires must be extinguished be- 
fore one retires for the night. No one dreams 
of keeping a fire alive over night and this 
custom often deprives me of the enjoyment 
of those dreamy hours around midnight 
when the household settles down to slum- 
ber. Have I performed a generous action 
during the day, it is then that my approving 
conscience gently urges me to renewed be- 
nevolence. Has a thought of the mysterious 
Being filled my anxious soul, distracting my 
mind with ceaseless questioning, it is then 
that the veil is partly drawn aside, and on 
my knees I can thank Him for the Hope that 
is within me. Or have I been unjust, or 



172 A Dreamer in Paris 



done an injury to one of my fellow mortals, 
the grief is less poignant, my remorse less 




keen under the softening glow of a mid- 
night fire. 
In Paris I am deprived of these hours, by 



A Dreamer in Paris 173 

my landlady, who leaves me a bare shovel- 
ful of coal, which is all consumed before 
ten o'clock. There is then nothing to do but 
to go to bed and keep warm, or to sit brood- 
ing over a cold fireplace, which is death to 
all manner of cheerfulness. 



In the morning I finished my book on Na- 
poleon. 

"You know the end of it all — how all 
people, indignant at being plundered, fell on 
us together — Russians, Germans, English, 
Swedes, Italians, and Spaniards, — and that 
we were obliged to disgorge pictures, prov- 
inces, and crowns, with an indemnity of a 
milliard, or a thousand millions. These peo- 
ple held garrisons among us, they remained 
in our fortresses till we had paid up the last 
centime; they took all the conquests of the 
Republic away from us — these were real 
conquests: Austria and Prussia had attacked 
us unjustly: we had conquered them, and 



174 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

the Austrian possessions in the Low Coun- 
tries, and all the left bank of the Rhine, had 
become French by treaty. Well, they took 
these from us too, the best of our conquests ; 
that is what the genius of Bonaparte had 
done for us." 



In the afternoon 1 passed by the tomb of 
Napoleon, again, and the thought came to 
my mind that if I was a Frenchman, and a 
citizen of the present-day Republic, I should 
be glad that Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. 
Requiescai in pace. 



Parisians take one thing seriously; the 
magnificent opera. All streets lead to the 
Place de I'Opera. The present building as 
recent as 1875, from designs of Charles 
Gamier is truly sumptuous and is above ad- 
verse criticism. The grand staircase of mar- 
ble arrests the wandering eyes of the merest 



A Dreamer in Paris 



175 



dreamer, by its imposing and stately mag- 
nificence, and compels his attention. 

Into the corridors of this superb structure 
I wandered aimlessly one morning, and 
found myself in 
line before the 
ticket window. A 
gendarme took 
charge of me at 
this point and ob- 
serving my evident 
struggles with the 
idiomatic French 
and the idiotic old 
woman who pre- 
sided over the box 
office affairs, he 
kindly purchased 
for me the very 
worst seat in the whole building. It was 
on the extreme right of the second galerie, 
and in the rear of a box already occupied 
by three others who had secured the front 




176 A Dreamer in Paris 

seats. I could see nothing but the backs of 
my companions and a confused mass of faces 
in the opposite rows of seats. 

The opera rendered was ** Delilah," and 
as the music rose in its entrancing harmony 
I forgot my uncomfortable quarters in the 
exquisite melody. 

At the first opportunity, however, during 
an intermission I determined to change my 
seat, and right here is where I ran against the 
unbending front of French officialdom. 

The house was not full and there were 
many vacant seats on the first floor. Toward 
one of these I cast a covetous eye and began 
my attack by regular approaches. First I 
bribed the woman usher who had charge of 
my box. She introduced me to the favorable 
notice of the ''special," we should call him 
— the man in charge of the lobby, who in 
turn escorted me to the floor below and intro- 
duced me — for a consideration — to the gentle- 
manly usher on that floor; and so on by easy 
descending grades of stairways, but with in- 



A Dreamer in Paris 



11 



creasing dignity and importance on the part 
of the ushers, until I stood in the presence 
of the man who I imagined by a single nod 
of his head could change my seat of misery 
into a throne of happiness. To him I poured 
out my tale of disappointment; and he lis- 
tened with the air of a wise physician who 
knows that it is not good for the child, but 
who is willing to humor him. 

It cost me two francs to find that this dig- 
nitary was only a thirty-second degree usher 
and that I had not, as yet, reached the 
director. By this time I had a following of 
attendants equally imposing as those who 
followed the ancient senators, when they 
went to an official audience. It had already 
cost me so much silver that I felt a wild spirit 
of reckless extravagance come over me as I 
approached the great Finality. 

"There is but one seat in the house," re- 
marked His Excellency, — and I held my 
breath as he added — ' ' on the first fioor ; " that 
monsieur could have for the trifling difference 



179 A Dreamer in Paris 

in cost between that and the one monsieur 
had purchased. 

I have since learned that this is the usual 
formula and that it is generally most effective. 
With me it was contrariwise. I plunged 
ahead in a whirl of financial abandon and 
soon found myself sitting at the feet of the 
very elect — on a strapontin, or bracket-seat 
hung to one of the end seats! 

I know what that change cost me, but I 
shan't mention it. For weeks I have been 
haunting the cheap restaurants conducting 
my perigrinations on foot. By economizing 
in other directions I hope to restore that nice 
equilibrium between expenditure and income 
the disturbance of which is madness. 



t|f 



I would as soon fish in a well regulated 
aquarium, and catch the fat and lazy impris- 
oned goldfish, as to buy books at the Odeon 
book-stalls. There is no sport in either 
effort. The familiar names of modern French 



A Dreamer in Paris 



179 



writers are ranged in endless rows of their 
works,— generally in sets— resplendent in 
coverings of purple and fine linen. There is 
none of the excitement of the search for lost 
treasures in the Odeon. It has the appear- 
ance of a market; and the keen-visaged stall 
owners know to 
the last sous the 
exact value of 
each book or 
pamphlet. They 
watch one from 
the corners of 
their eyes and re- 
sent any exami- 
nation or hand- 
ling of their wares. They even tie the books 
with strings— to prevent the idle and curious 
from opening them. 

I felt like asking the sharp-nosed fellow, 
who was watching me, to please give me a 
pound of Hugo, one-half a pound of Daudet, 
a yard of Halevy and one quart of Dumas! 




i8o A Dreamer in Paris 

They appear to handle books, at the Odeon 
stalls, like meat and groceries, or dry goods 
at retail. 



Near by is the Musee de Luxembourg 
which receives such works of living artists as 
are acquired by the government. From the 
Luxembourg the works of each artist are re- 
moved to the Louvre ten years after his death. 
One can dream over the beautiful paintings 
and marbles, without let or hindrance. But 
it is in the Gardens of the Luxembourg that 
the clouds of reverie envelop and make sad 
the heart of a dreamer. I am in the shadow 
of the old Palace of the Luxembourg built by 
Marie de Medicis. It is still winter although 
according to the French calendar we should 
have spring. The sun is shining brightly, but 
the trees are bare of leaves, and the graveled 
walks are wet and soggy. A man and 
woman have chosen the driest and barest 
spot in the garden for their Punch and Judy 



A Dreamer in Paris i8l 



show, and a group of half-frozen children 
with their nurses are shivering with cold and 
nervous excitement, on the outer edge of the 
rope barrier, 
waiting for the 
performance to 
commence. 1 
have selected 
the most shel- 
tered spot I can 
find, to absorb 
the heat from 
the sun's rays, 
and recall the 
Pitti Palace in 
Florence, where 
Marie de Medicis 
was born, — be- 
cause I am told 
that the old 
Palace of the Luxembourg was designed in a 
style which was intended to convey a rem- 
iniscence of the Florentine Palazzo Pitti. 




1 82 A Dreamer in Paris 

It was only the other day, so to speak, 
that I wandered through the Pitti Palace in 
Florence, and I am almost ashamed to con- 
fess that the works of Raphael and Titian, of 
Velasquez and Murillo, had no such charm 
for me as I derived from my imagination, 
while idly gazing from a window that over- 
looked the River Arno. The canvas was but a 
dead thing, and I soon tired of the seemingly 
endless five hundred or more master-pieces 
covering yards of it upon the walls; but there 
was the river, itself, the same River Arno. 

And the Medicis who gazed upon it from 
this very window! I could think of them, 
and bring them back, in my imagination, so 
that they became real and I was in their 
midst and was one of them. 

Although I know it is pure paganism and 
contrary to all the rules governing a polite 
education, nevertheless I am restless, and 
find myself growing irritable, whenever I 
hear the name of Michael (pronounced 
''Mickle") Angelo. 



A Dreamer in Paris 183 

One can have too much even of the old 
masters. 

The shrill screams of laughter, from the di- 
rection of the Punch and Judy show, remind 
me that I am still in the Garden of the Lux- 
embourg. 




I am in the company of marble statues of 
Marguerite de Valois, of Sainte Clotilde, of 
Joan of Arc and Marie Stuart, of Sainte Gen- 
eveive— and a real Punch and Judy show! • 

And then I remember the Luxembourg as 
a prison, during the Reign of Terror;— a 



184 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

prison that contained amongst others the 
Vicomte de Beauharnais and his wife Joseph- 
ine, afterward Empress of the French. 

Where I am now standing, under the 
benign influence of the sun's warming rays, 
the people used to come in 1793, and stand 
for hours *Mn the hope of being able to have 
a last sight of their friends, when they were 
allowed to show themselves at the win- 
dows." 

*' De quoi se plaignent done, ces damnis 
aristocrates ? Nous les logeons dans les cha- 
teaux royaux ! " 

Of what, indeed } the miserable grumblers. 
Happiness enough for them to dwell for 
even so brief a period in the house of royalty. 
It must have been depressing, however, to 
hear the paid scoundrel who paced to and 
fro under their windows calling in a sepul- 
chral voice: 

''La liste des soixante ou quatre-vingts 
gagnants a la loterie de la sainte guillotine ! " 

But where are the children } I have stayed 



A Dreamer in Paris 185 

too long in this damp old garden. The 
twinges of cold are racking my extremities, 
and 1 shall have to pay for an hour's indul- 
gence in March sunshine with several days 
of prudence, indoors. 

My landlady does not think much of the 
Aristocracy, judging by the contemptuous 
toss of her head, the upward shrug of her 
shoulders, and the glance of her beady black 
eyes, whenever 1 speak of the marquis 
who occupies the first floor of our apartment 
house. I was congratulating her upon hav- 
ing so distinguished a lodger, when she in- 
formed me that she would much prefer rent- 
ing all her rooms to Americans. 

"But, why ?" 1 naturally enquired. 

"Ah! monsieur, Americans are all rich." 
She rolled her eyes coquettishly, and rubbed 
her hands together with such unction that it 
made me shiver. I expect to have trouble 
with that woman before she will let me 



1 86 A Dreamer in Paris 

leave her house. It's an easy matter to rent 
apartments in Paris, but to go away from 
them is an entirely different experience. Sup- 
posing that you have the courage, first of all, 
to say that you contemplate leaving, it will 
require much greater bravery to face the in- 
numerable charges that will be made against 
you before your moving has been concluded. 
An exact and minute account has been kept 
of the daily condition of your room and con- 
tents, a missing tumbler, or candle from 
the mantelpiece, a scratch on the wall paper, 
a loose leg in a chair, a knob broken from 
the bureau, an old bottle from the closet, a 
dilapidated whisk-broom, or feather duster. 
Things which you never knew were in the 
room are now missing and to be accounted 
for in francs and centimes. 

The day preceding the one fixed for my 
departure "my landlady arrived, early in the 
morning, and proceeded to check off from 
an inventory the various articles which fur- 
nished my room. The bonne accompanied 



A Dreamer in Paris 187 

her and the pair went through the Hst with a 
detailed accuracy that filled me with wonder 
and dismay. They counted the rungs in the 
chairs, and the legs on each table. I think 
that they checked off each tack in the carpet, 
and each flower pattern on the wall paper. 

The result to her seemed appalling. I had 
lost, broken, or stolen: — 

One lamp chimney. I remember the night 
when I had risked the lamp, and had fallen 
asleep and nearly suffocated with the smoke 
from that rickety old petrole burner. 

Three glass tumblers. Oh, yes ! that was 
on New Year's Eve. I had a few Americans 
"celebrating" in my room. 

Two colored candles. ''I won't pay for 
those," I said, 'Mf you sue me," — but the 
old lady did not understand a word of English, 
and kept grimly at work on her inventory. 

One worsted tassel. "But, madame," 1 
pleaded, " what under the seven stars which 
composed the constellation at my birth, 
what" — I implored her — "could an honor- 



1 88 A Dreamer in Paris 

able gentleman find in his heart that would 
tempt him to steal a worsted tassel! " The 
dignity of my reproach, uttered in the 
choicest interlined French, seemed to touch 
my landlady for a moment as she stood, 
arms akimbo. 

"Ah, monsieur," she replied, "it was 
there. It is now no more." She shrugged her 
shoulders and pointed with a pathetic gesture 
of loss to a short string which dangled limply 
from the edge of a much faded curtain. 
Then she smiled again; and I knew that her 
heart was hardened, and that she would not 
let me go. 



»jb 



What is this subtle fascination that per- 
meates the air of Paris, and insinuates itself 
into one's inmost soul ? What mysterious 
and occult forces are at work in our unknown 
surroundings, in the movement of which the 
pagan goddess Isis seems to rule .? Isis, "the 
universal mother nature, mistress of all 



A Dreamer in Paris 189 

elements, first-born of the ages, supreme of 
goddesses, queen of names, ruler of the 
gods, sole manifestation of all gods and 
goddesses, whose glance makes awful silence 
in the shining heights of heaven, in the 
depths of the sea, and of the world beneath, 
whose unchanging being is worshipped 
under many forms, with many rites, and 
under various names, as mother of the gods, 
as the Cecropian Minerva, Paphian Venus, 
Dictynnian Diana, Stygian Proserpina, the 
ancient goddess Ceres, as Juno, Bellona, 
Hecate, Rhammesia" — but whose true name 
is Queen Isis. 

With arms extended across a stone parapet 
I hold fast to the solid earth while my soul 
takes wing and soars to the feet of Isis. ** I 
am that which is, has been, and shall be. 
My veil no one has lifted. The fruit I bore 
was the sun." 

Beneath me the dark waters of the Seine 
flow silently through the city, the city of 
Julian who here erected an altar to Isis, — the 



190 A Dreamer in Paris 

favorite goddess of the Parisians. The 
twinkling stars of the dark firmament above 
me meet the thousands of the city's lights and 
are lost in numbers. I can imagine the 
sacred ship of Isis, launched from the shore of 
the He de la Cite in memory of the goddess 
who sought in the sea the body of her 
spouse. In the arms of Paris, and in old 
carvings is the ship of Isis. *' Pagan Paris be- 
lieved in Isis, Christian Paris continued to be- 
lieve in her even after her temple had been 
razed to the ground to make way for the 
cathedral of Notre Dame: for as late as 
the reign of Louis XIII a statue of Isis 
was worshipped by the old women in 
the church of Saint Germain des Pres 
until one day the Bishop of Meaux, Guil- 
laume Bri^onnet, caused the idol to be broken 
in the public street, and a red cross to be 
erected, in token of wrath and of purification 
— La Croix Rouge — which has remained in the 
street nomenclature of modern Paris." 
For the moment I am at the feet of Isis. I 



A Dreamer in Paris 191 

eagerly inhale the breeze that fills my lungs 
with the mystery, the witchery, the fascina- 
tion of Pagan Paris. Beneath my feet flows the 
treacherous river whose lurking depths con- 
ceal the unknown. Above, are the stars, the 
everlasting stars, and beyond are the lights 
of the city. 

Perhaps the spirit of 
Isis still moves on the 
surface of this danger- 
ous river, still hovers 
over and mingles with 
those eternal stars and 
the midnight lights. Per- 
haps that is the mystery, 
the secret, the inscrutable 
charm, that envelops 
Paris, Pagan Paris, the midnight Paris of to- 
day. 

For Isis was the goddess above all others 
who represented the feminine, and whether 
for good or evil it is the feminine that rules 
Paris. In the service of Isis there must have 




192 A Dreamer in Paris 

been a peculiar attractiveness, a lofty and re- 
ligious enthusiasm which lay in the denial of 
feasting and of sensual pleasures. Through 
expiations and purifications it promised to 
lead its votaries to sanctification of life, and 
to a truer perception of the life divine. 

Hail! O Isis! — the goddess of the recep- 
tive and producing principle in Nature, the 
goddess of procreation and birth, the god- 
dess who called to herself her select circle of 
worshipers in a dream — the goddess of the 
dreamers in Paris. 

The French have no equivalent for our 
word " Home." This is easily demonstrated 
by taking the soul cry of an exiled American : 
"Home, Home, sweet, sweet Home" and 
translating it into French: ''Coin du feu, 
Coin du feu, joli, jolie Coin du feu,'' which 
at its best would mean: ** Fireside, Fireside, 
beautiful, beautiful Fireside! " In this equiv- 
alent the overpowering, all-pervading at- 



A Dreamer in Paris 193 

mosphere of longing which permeates the 
word "Home"' is condensed and locaUzed 
into a single spot — into one of innumerable 
memories. When I dream of Home, it is 
not of one particular coin du feu — although 
my heart yearns for a certain little den, "a 
nook that's in a boudoir, out of the way, 
where one may sit like small Jack Horner, 
and let the Babel run 'round as it may,"— 
but through that, and over and around it, 
there cluster visions of the Schuylkill River 
winding its peaceful way through a valley of 
infinite charm and repose. I can feel again 
the thrill of awakening life when, as a boy, 
I discovered the first bunch of mountain 
pinks, along the banks of that river. Then, 
I knew that the hard, dreary winter had 
passed, and was gone. Then, I knew that 
the wild honeysuckles and the daisies, the 
dandelions and the snapdragons, the butter- 
cups and bluebells, would follow the moun- 
tain pinks and that we should soon be in the 
midst of flowers and of sunshine, of balmy 



194 ^ Dreamer in Paris 

air and sweet-smelling foliage — of glorious, 
living summer! 

Lazily extended in the shade of some wide- 
spreading tree, my head upon the lap of 
Mother Earth — of Isis — 1 can see through half- 
closed eyelids the contented kine leisurely 
chewing their cud, and enjoying the cool 
waters of the river. Beyond is an island, 
and on the other side of this mysterious 
bit of land — for to a boy, what island is not 
mysterious ? — there is a swimming pool whose 
waters are of more wonderful properties 
and temperature than any upon the known 
globe. Not even the aqux Gratiance of the 
Romans at Aix-les-Bains, or the waters of 
Carlsbad can revive my sinking spirits as do 
the thoughts of that swimming pool in the 
River Schuylkill. 

As the day advances the sun rises higher 
in the heavens and the fructifying earth 
warms into life the flowers and fruit, while 
arising from its surface is a quivering atmos- 
phere, full of the multitudinous infusoria 



A Dreamer in Paris 195 

and the ephemera. Of the latter Aristotle said : 
"Those among them which die at eight in 
the morning die in their youth ; those which 
live to see five in the afternoon, in their old 
age." With them Time must be indeed 
precious and still they buzz around in cease- 
less enjoyment— those minute atoms of that 
profound enigma we so flippantly embrace 
in one little word— Life. They are around 
me everywhere, but with my 
human eyes I can see only the 
larger, and hear the more 
noisy of the myriads in action. 
An angular grasshopper jumps 
across my leg, and looks, comically, proud 
of the achievement. A heavy honey-bee 
hangs suspended in the perfumed air above 
my head — its wings in buzzing action, — 
and then darts away as 1 make a pass 
for it with my old straw hat. It is of the 
species we call "black head" and no boy 
will tolerate a black head in such close 
proximity for a second. For they carry 




196 A Dreamer in Paris 



a "stinger" with the same reckless in- 
difference to its use as did D'Artagnan his 
sword. But whereas 
that Gascon adven- 
turer wielded his 
weapon with an in- 
discriminate and a 
joyous hilarity, this 
busy bee is studiously 
and oflfensively intru- 
sive. I know that it 
" improves each shin- 
ing hour " and I feel 
that it resents the presence of the dreamer. 

Go tol busy bee. ** Gather honey all the 
day from every open flower." For me the 
lazy life of the yellow and black butterfly flit- 
ting hither and yon over the tall tops of the 
waving corn. 




In the evening — the placid, peaceful closing 
of life — we go home, 1 and the busy bee. 
The butterfly is dead. The dancing, vivacious 



A Dreamer in Paris 



197 




ephemera are dead, 
all dead, and the 
cricket, the locust, 
and the frogs 
keep up a mourn- 
ful requiem, all 
through the night. 



When, in Paris I dream of Home, it is not 
of one particular coin du feu but of all those 
things that hang in the inmost recesses of 
the brain; that infinite panorama of joyous 
moments, the memory of which is a yearn- 
ing akin to pain. 



rr 



The sea is between us, — separating the 
dreamer from his beloved home, — and that 
thought constantly intruding its ghastly 
terror upon my mind clouds my understand- 
ing and bitters the pleasure of my strange 
surroundings. I have no love for the sea, 
and in that respect I am different from most 
Americans, and more alike to the French. 



198 A Dreamer in Paris 



I remember reading about Cato, who re- 
pented of three things: first, of letting a day 
pass without doing some good; second, of 
having confided a secret to a woman; third, 
of having gone in a boat when he might 
have gone by land. Horace agreed with 




Cato, that only madmen would trust them- 
selves to the mercy of the stormy ocean, and 
it was Byron who thought it the limit of 
rashness to venture upon the deep, and defy 
all four of the elements at once. And yet 
six times have I crossed "the pond" in- 
wardly resolving— as now I do again— that 



Xa Porte Saintsflnartln 




198 A Dreamer in Pans 



I remember v :!:o, who rc- 

pented -ucnng a day 

pass without ^iiA^y. ■ ood; second, of 

having confided a : ', woman; third, 

'' having frone ^n when he might 

QXted with 






» 




Cavo, truit only mau. :....... . ^uld trust them- 
selves to the mercy of the stormy ocean, and 
it was l>yron who thought it the limit of 
rashness to venture upon the deep,, and defy 
all four of the elements at once. And yet 
six tiiTies have I crossed "the pond" in- 
wardly resolving — as now I do again — that 



A Dreamer in Paris 199 

nothing shall ever tempt me to undertake 
another such hazardous adventure. In this 
respect, Americans are leading all others in 
their yearly invasion of Paris. To many of 
them the annual voyage to the French 
capital is of as little moment as would be 
a trip to the seashore. A French writer 
says: "For the American, life is a voyage, 
the earth is a hostelry: while for the French- 
man, life is an everlasting habit of always 
doing the same thing. They establish them- 
selves on the earth as if they were never go- 
ing to leave it." 



It was a Chinese 5^1^^^/ who said: "Pigs 
are the only true gentlemen, because they do 
nothing." I feel the grunting satisfaction of 
the pig in my idleness this bright sunny 
morning, for 1 have absolutely no sensation, 
— on the south side of this wall,— excepting 
the animal delight of feeling comfortably 
warm, and of doing nothing. On the north 
side of my wall is the site of Balzac's former 



200 A Dreamer in Paris 

home, and the street into which I have 
strolled is the Rue Balzsic. Pierre, my cocker, 
pronounces it ''bsX-^ack," putting the ac- 
cent on the last syllable, and at the name 
my imagination conjures up that giant of 




letters who in life had only two desires — 
"to be famous, and to be loved"; that 
gentle master " who was never heard to say 
an evil word of any one." 

He reached his desires, poor human; for 
he was famous and also loved, — and then 
close upon the fruition of his cherished 
plans came — Death. 



A Dreamer in Paris 201 




It was right here, just over the garden 
wall, that Victor Hugo rang the bell of 
Balzac's door. He had been informed that 
his friend was dying. 

"1 rang," says Hugo; "the 
moon was veiled by clouds; 
the street deserted. No one 
came. I rang again. The 
gate opened; a woman came 
forward, weeping. I gave 
Hugo my name, and was told to 

enter the salon, which was on the ground 
floor. . . . We passed along a corridor, and 
up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded 
with works of art of all kinds— vases, pic- 
tures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing 
porcelains. I heard a loud and difficult breath- 
ing. I was in M. de Balzac's bedroom. 

''The bed was in the middle of the room. 
M. de Balzac lay in it, his head supported by 
a mound of pillows. His face was purple, 
almost black. The hair was gray, and cut 
rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. 



202 A Dreamer in Paris 

His side face was like Napoleon. ... I 
raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. 
It was moist with perspiration. I pressed 
it; he made no answer to the pressure. . . . 
He died in the night." His premonition of 
early years written to his friend Dablin had 
proven true. ''\ foresee the darkest of 
destinies for myself; that will be to die 
when all that now 1 wish for shall be about 
to come to me." 

I have written his life's motto across the 
portals of my heart: 

''All happiness depends on courage and 
work.'' 

Therein lies the secret of living. 

** He died in the night," continues Hugo. 
**. . . The funeral service took place at Saint- 
Philippe-du-Roule. The procession crossed 
Paris and went by the way of the boulevards to 
Pere-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left 
the church, and when we reached the ceme- 
tery. It was one of those days when the 
heavens seemed to weep. We walked the 



A Dreamer in Paris 203 

whole distance. I was at the head of the 
coffin on the right, holding one of the silver 
tassels of the pall. Alexander Dumas was on 
the other side. . . . When we reached the 
grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the 




crowd was immense. . . . The coffin was 
lowered into the grave. The priest said a 
last prayer and I a few words. While I was 
speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay 
before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of 
the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed 
to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull 



204 -^ Dreamer in Paris 



sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin 
broke in upon my last words." 




Hugo, Dumas, and Balzac — these three ; 
but the greatest of these was Balzac. 



I pass much of my time in the search for 
the makers of French literature. From my 
youth up I have had a more or less hazy 



A Dreamer in Paris 205 





knowledge of the authors who now welcome 
me from their shelves at the 
booksellers in Paris. It is my 
pleasure to become better ac- 
quainted with them, and to 
arrange them in my mind, 
chronologically. 
There is Joinville, the his- 
torian who 
reached the 
age of ninety- 
five years, and 
nessed the reigns of no fewer 
than six kings. 
Froissart, whose writings are more fre- 
quently quoted than are those 
of any other chronicler. 

Philippe de Comines, un- 
questionably the first authority 
on the history of the times of , 
Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, 
and of King Louis XL 1 have 
him in quaint little i2mo. 



Joinville 
who wit- 



Froissart 




Comines 



2o6 A Dreamer in Paris 




Rabelais 



Rabelais, the father of ridicule, a witty 
and a learned man, — and like- 
wise so bad and profane that 
the kernels of wisdom in his 
writings are lost in their rough 
coverings. 

Blaise de Montluc, the cruel 
old soldier, who became an 
author at the age of seventy-five. His Com- 
mentaries was called by Henry 
IV, "The soldier's breviary." 
Montaigne, the essayist, and 
friend of La Boetie, — the 
gentle old writer who stoutly 
refused to believe that all 
learning began 
and ended with 
the so-called 
classical writers, 
reason are common to all, and 
Montaigne are no more proper unto him 
that spoke them heretofore than unto him 
that shall speak them hereafter. And it is no 





Montluc 
' Truth and 



A Dreamer in Paris 



207 




more according to Plato's opinion than to 

mine since both he and I understand and see 

alil^e. The bees do here and 

there suck this and cull that 

flower, but afterward they 

produce the honey which is 

peculiarly their own; then is it 

no more thyme or marjoram." 
Then there was Francois 

Malherbe, who might be 
called a **poet laureate" at 
the court of Henry IV, and 
Sully, who is authority for 
the events that occurred in 
France from 1570 to 16 10. 
^ ^ Balzac— not the author I 

have previously mentioned— 

one of the first members of 

the French Academy. He 

wrote Le Prince and several 

volumes of Letters. 
Guy Patin, celebrated for 

his Letters, which furnish a P^^^^ 





2o8 A Dreamer in Paris 




picture of the history of medicine for about 
fifty years. Guy Patin, *' satirical from head 
to foot." 

Mademoiselle Scudery, who 
began to write her many-vol- 
umed romances about the year 
1637. There is not much in 
them either of interest or 
amusement to my generation, 
Mile. Scudery ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^j^ lady-she lived 

to be ninety-four — was called *'The Tenth 
Muse." 

La Rochefoucauld, the friend of King Louis 
XIV. What did he write? 
Why, one little maxim 
amongst a lot of others, 
which in itself is the con- 
centrated essence of wis- 
dom: — 




Rochefoucauld 



" One is never so happy nor so unhappy as one im- 
agines." 



Together with such household words as; 



A Dreamer in Parts 209 




" There is nothing men give so liberally as their advice," 

and the equally common saying: 

" There is no fool like an old fool." 

Goto! old dreamer. " Few people know 
how to be old." Remem- 
ber that, and think not to 
say, " I am as old as I feel," 
for there is no truth in such 
philosophy, and a kittenish 
old age is foolishness. 

Pascal, who during his 
short life of thirty-nine years endured twenty 
years of pain and suffering. He was a 
Jansenist and his Lettres Provinciales, con- 
tain a satirical exposure of the 
system of the Jesuits. 

tMlV"mi»/s Bossuet, the ** Eagle of 
I^P^W Meaux." He was a member 

\ ' of the Academy. Here is an 

Bossuet arrow from his quiver. May 
it reach the vitals of some sneering cynic: — 

'* Kind actions are the bond of public and 
private peace. He who acknowledges favors 



2IO A Dreamer in Paris 

loves to do them, and, by banishing ingrati- 
tude, the pleasure of doing good remains so 
pure, that it is impossible to be insensible to 
it any longer." 

And old La Bruyere ? No one seems to 
know much about him. By the way, he 
was not so very old either when he died; 
about fifty-two. And fifty- 
two does not seem as old in a 
man's allotted period as it did 
thirty years ago — La Bruyere 
has been in my library every 
Bruyere day of that time. I remember 
the Caracteres. 

" Ruffin is beginning to grow gray; but 
he is healthy, and his fresh complexion and 
lively eye promise him still some twenty 
years of life: he is gay, jovial, familiar, in- 
different: he laughs with all his heart, and he 
laughs all alone, without any reason; he is 
pleased with himself, his family, his little 
fortune; he says he is happy. He loses his 
only son, a very hopeful young man, who 




• 7") * 

A Dreamer in Jr c. '^ 2 1 1 



might have been one day the honor of 
his family; he surrenders to others the 
trouble of lamenting for him, saying, ' My 
son is dead; it will kill his mother; ' and he 
is comforted. He has no passions, he has 
neither friends nor foes, he dislikes nobody, 
everybody pleases him; everything suits 
him; he speaks to any one whom he sees 
for the first time with the same freedom and 
confidence as he does to those whom he calls 
his old friends, and he soon imparts to him 
his puns and his little stories. You may 
come up to him, and you may leave him 
without his paying any attention to the fact, 
and the same story that he has begun to tell 
to one person he will finish to the person 
who takes his place." 

Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray, appeared 
to me in my quaint little volume of Les 
Amours de Tilemaque, which I fished out of 
the rubbish in the book-stalls along the 
Seine. The volume cost me five cents; and 
for some unknown reason I treasure it more 



212 A^^ju. 'earner in Paris 

than tb*^ beautiful London edition,— extra 
iUotrated, and sumptuously bound in two 
volumes,— that shines, in gorgeous red mo- 
rocco, behind the glass doors of my book- 
case. 

Here is an author who practiced what he 
preached. Here is a Frenchman whose life 
was an exemplification of the moral lessons 
which his works contained. 

** The Telemachus of Fenelon is distin- 
guished by every ornament 
which the pen of taste and ele- 
gance could bestow on the lan- 
guage of virtue; while it capti- 
vates the heart, it improves the 
understanding." 
I shall keep Telemachus on the 
little shelf at my bedside, in neighborly prox- 
imity to the Resolves of Owen Felltham. A 
perusal of such writings is, to the sin-laden 
mind, as refreshing spring water to the 
feverish body. 




A Dreamer tn^ P^^^^ 213 



Alain Rene Le Sage! Dear me!^ ^ ""^ust be 
a hundred years old; so many things w^ve 
happened since I became the happy owner 
of Gil Bias of Santillane. And yet it seems 
but yesterday, for I can smell the apple blos- 
soms, and the fragrant hay; the lilacs that 
grew against a neighboring 
wall, — the first to blossom 
in the awakening spring. 
There was an old-fash- 
ioned garden in a country 
town, just a plain square 
enclosure, full of all sorts ^^ ^^S^ 

and varieties of plants and flowers. In the 
spring the vigorous rhubarb seemed to grow 
and expand into full leaf in one night, and 
there was an asparagus bed, surrounded by 
tangled raspberry bushes; a wonderful 
growth, a sort of "cut-and-come-again," 
that required no attention beyond an occa- 
sional sprinkling of salt! 

Along the fences were astonishing masses 
of gooseberry and currant bushes; and in the 




214 ^ -O^ ' ^^^ ^^ Paris 



cool dark co-^^ners were clusters of lilies of the 

valley. - 
' i remember that garden; and here in Paris 
the memory brings a pang of homesickness, 
and a feeling of sadness that my soul strug- 
gles against in vain. 

There is no garden like that one, in Paris. 

Where shall I go in this artistic land to find 
such sweet disorder, such intertwining of 
fruits and flowers, such entangling foliage ? 

In a corner of that garden grew an old 
wide-spreading apple-tree; and far up in its 
branches I had constructed a comfortable 
seat. In the depths of that shady retreat I 
was secure from interruption and there I 
first met Alain Rene Le Sage. 

Is Gil Bias a good book .? I will take the 
answer to that question from Saintsbury: 
"When a book has actually been read by 
half-a-dozen successive sets of the inhabitants 
of the earth, when its most remarkable inci- 
dents and characters have become part of the 
common stock of furniture possessed even 



A Dreamer in Paris 215 

by a very modest housekeeper in things liter- 
ary, then there is not much reason for ques- 
tioning the value." 



I know little of Montesquieu; of all the 
French authors he is perhaps the least known 
to Americans, and yet he had the most varied 
fortune of all writers of his own or any other 
age. **Now extolled to the clouds as the 
master of political science, as the man of 
genius who had rediscovered the title-deeds 
of the human race; now denounced as 
laudator temporis acti, the apostle of priv- 
ilege, and the defender of abuses." 
1 have three small volumes of his "Per- 
sian Letters " and 1 must con- 
fess that the correspondence 
that passed between Usbek 
and his friend Rustan, "at 
Ispahan, during the second of 
Montesquieu the moon of Rhamazan," is 
as uninteresting as that of Usbek, and his 




2l6 A Dreamer in Paris 

old complaining wife Zachi, or his new one 
Roxana. 

I imagine they are not of interest to me be- 
cause I dislike the kind of framework upon 
which is hung scraps of moral reflections 
and maxims cut from the works of serious 
writers. I like a play and I often need a ser- 
mon, but an indiscriminate mixture of both 
gives me mental dyspepsia. 



I dislike Voltaire. I don't like any of the 
writers who deliberately 
attack virtue and the Chris- 
tian religion. My reason 
for this is based upon very 
simple, but to me entirely 
conclusive, lines: They at- 
tempt to destroy and pull f^oltaire 
down a structure of belief founded upon the 
best and noblest thought and feelings of 
humanity, and then these cowardly authors 
run away! — like thieves or incendiaries. 




A 'Dreamer in Paris 217 

They maliciously set fire to the Temple and 
leave it a blackened mass of ruins and deso- 
lation. If these pusillanimous cravens could 
give me something better than that which 
they take from me, I could find it in my 
heart to admire their genius. 

The "apostle of Epicurean deism" is not 
welcome to my library. I do not wish 
to possess any of Voltaire's malevolence or 
ill-will. 



Buffon is gladly received amongst my 
friends. I know him only through a dilapi- 
dated copy of his "Natural 
History " — a single volume 
with old wood-cuts, two 
on a page. 

I was not much over ten 
years old when I found that 
book, and rescued it from 
the bats and the dusty oblivion of a country 
garret. 




2l8 A Dreamer in Paris 



Rousseau, "his strange 
character, his morbid sensi- 
bility, his insane vanity, his 
shameless depravity, the 
singular genius and extensive 
influence of his writings." 




Saint Pierre. I know him through the 
medium of a small book called ''Paul and 
Virginia." I don't want any 
better introduction. If he 
had never written his 
** Voyage a I'lle de France," 
or his more famous "Etudes 
de la Nature," I should ad- 
mire him for "Paul and ^t- Pierre 
Virginia." It sounds almost banal and com- 
monplace to hear a man of years discourse 
on the beauties of "Robinson Crusoe," of 
"Rasselas," of "The Epicurean," of "Vat- 
tiek," of "Gulliver's Travels," of "The 
Arabian Nights,"— of "Paul and Virginia." 




A Dreamer in Paris 



219 



And yet, what is there, in life, including 
the hope of immortality, more keen and soul- 
absorbing than the memory of childhood? 

How thought fills the brain. How tears 
flood the eyes. How laughter follows close, 
— before the tear can be dried. Memory! — 
Grant to me, dear Lord, the spirit of youth 
so that though my body is worn with the 
lapse of years and continuous effort, my 
mind will still be that of a boy. 

'*It is the natural instinct of the unhappy, 
to seekto recall visions 
of happiness by the 
remembrance of their 
past pleasures. When 
I feel tired of my life, 
when I feel my heart 
dried up by inter- 
course with other men 
I involuntarily turn my 
head away, and heave 
a sigh of regret over the past." 




Lamartine 



220 A Dreamer tn Paris 



That is from Chateau- 
briand, the author of Le 
Ginie du Christianisme. 
. He spent some time in the 
* United States, and paid a 
''^ visit to General Washing- 
Chateaubriand ton. I don't know much 
about him. I should like to know more. 




I have Guizot the states- 
man and historian, and 
Lamartine the poet, but 
nothing by Thiers, who 
wrote the History of the 
French Rev- 





Guizot 



Thiers 



oluti n — 
which only goes to show the 
poverty of my collection of 
French authors, for Thiers 
was one of the greatest writers 
of the age. 



A Dreamer in Paris 221 

When I dream of modern French fiction I 
have a nightmare, and awake thanking For- 
tune that there is so Httle of it in my Hbrary. 

The small amount I possess is, however, 
so superlatively good, I can understand why 
there is not more. Like rare bits of gold 
washed from the muddy stream, or a few 
exquisite lilies culled from a stagnant pond, 
my few treasures are more precious when 
removed from their polluted surroundings. 

I like to float in the unused channels of my 
mind and, with memory for a guide, cruise 
around the old familiar coves and inlets into 
the sea of forgetfulness. In these moods I 
often meet my old friends L'Abbe Constan- 
tin and Jean Reynaud, the brave lieutenant 
of artillery, also Madame Scott and the ador- 
able Bettina. 1 form part of their company 
in the Chateau de Longueval and go with 
them to le presbyter e of the old priest where 
the one room, on the ground floor, served 
for parlor and dining-room, and communi- 
cated directly with the kitchen, by a door 



222 A Dreamer in Paris 

always wide open. I know the old homie 
Pauline. I can see her at the kitchen win- 
dow, and hear the lieutenant with his 
hearty: — 

'' Bonjour, ma bonne Pauline, ga va Men? 
— Tres bien—Je m'occupe de ton diner — 
VeuX'tu savoir ce que tu auras? De la 
soupe aux pommes de terre, un gigot et des 
ceufs au lait, — cest admirable ! J 'adore tout 
cela et je meurs dejaim." 

When I would read ''L'Abbe Constantin" 
with my French professor he was wont to 
describe, most minutely, the various ingredi- 
ents forming Pauline's ''soupe aux pommes 
de terre." " You take a nice big potato, and 
slice it so" — It was an object lesson, and he 
would perform the slicing process with a 
paper knife. "Then you take carrots, and 
a turnip, so"— I lost interest at the turnip 
period — " a few juicy young onions, and 
some white celery, mixing in, so " — Round 
went the paper knife and, so vivid was my 
imagination, I could see the steam hissing 



A Dreamer in Paris 223 

and fuming from under the pot lid, and 
could even smell the delightful aroma arising 
from the boiling mess. Added to this it was 
my lunch hour. I had no other spare time 
in those days, and I frequently took fifty 
minutes of French conversation and the re- 
maining ten minutes for a hasty sandwich. 
I was dying with hunger, and I rushed off 
to the nearest restaurant for a plate of vege- 
table soup. 

Somehow it never tasted nearly so de- 
licious in the reality as it did in my imagi- 
nation. 

Was there ever a more delightful character 
in the fiction of any nation than L'Abbe Con- 
stantin ? When Madame Scott and Bettina 
poured the gold into his hands for the poor 
of his parish: — 

''Deux mille francs! deux milk francs 
pour mes pauvres ! 

" Pauline ft brusquement une nouvelle ap- 
parition. 

''Deux mille francs! deux mille francs ! 



224 -^ Dreamer in Paris 

**// par ait, dit le cur 6, il par ait — Tene.:{^ 
Pauline, serrei cet argent et faites attention. 
— Elle itait Men des choses au logis, la vieille 
Pauline, servante, cuisini^re, pharmacienne 
trdsori^re. Ses mains regurent avec un tr em- 
blement respectneux ces deux petits rouleaux 
d'or qui reprisentaient tant de mis^res adou- 
sies, tant de dottleurs dimmtUes. 

" Ce n'est pas tout, monsieur le Curi, dit 
Madame Scott, je vous donnerai cinq cents 
francs tous les mois. 

" Etjeferai comme ma soeur. 

" Mille francs par mois ! Mais alors il n'y 
aura plus de pauvres dans le pays." 

When the curi receives an invitation to 
dine at the chateau he remembers his weak- 
ness — sleeping after dinner — and he makes 
Jean promise, "If you see that I begin to 
snore, pinch me gently on the arm." Jean 
makes the promise, but alas: — 

"The coffee was served on the terrace in 
front of the chateau. One heard afar off the 
faint sound of the old village clock striking 



A Dreamer in Paris 225 

nine. The fields and woods were sleep- 
ing. The lawn appeared to be but undu- 
lating wavy lines. The moon slowly emerg- 
ing shone above the great trees, . . . 
L'abbi se perdit dans une tris agriable 
reverie: il se retroiivait che^ liii: ses iddes 
pen a peu se confondirent ei s' emhrouilllrent. 
La rtvene devint de V engoiirdissement, Ven- 
gourdissement de la somnolence ; le desastre 
fut bienlot complet, irreparable, Le cur6 
s'endormit profondiment, Ce diner merveil- 
leux et les deux ou trois verres de vin de 
Champagne itaient bien pour quelque chose 
dans la catastrophe.'' 

It is not fair to translate a French romance 
into English — not fair to the author. It loses 
nearly everything. But I may have readers 
— nearly every author has a few — and some 
of mine may not have read Halevy and his 
" simple anodyne novel," which had such a 
phenomenal success in Paris and across the 
Channel. For these I will translate : — 

"John had perceived nothing. He had 



226 A Dreamer in Paris 

forgotten the promise made to his god- 
father. And why had he forgotten ? Because 
Madame Scott and Miss Percival had put their 
feet on the tabarets placed before their great 
cushioned wicker chairs. Then they had 
lazily leaned back and their petticoats had 
lifted, a little — very little, but enough how- 
ever to exhibit four little feet. They ap- 
peared very shapely, distinct and neat under 
two pretty fringes of white lace lighted by 
the moon. John regarded them, — these lit- 
tle feet, — and asked himself the question: — 

* ' * Which are the smallest ? ' 

" They awoke the old curi, by singing, first 
softly and then gradually louder, without 
offending his dignity." 



I should like to have written " L' Abbe 
Constantin." When it appeared, '' Paris 
gorged with morbid realism and material- 
ism, drank greedily at the pure crystalline 
well; surprised and gratified to find itself ac- 



A Dreamer in Paris 227 

cessible to idyllic emotions, proud of white- 
washing its record for ever so brief a time, 
it made a loud demonstration of candor and 
innocent enjoyment." 

It would be well for Paris if more writers 
like Halevy would appear; if more French- 
men would describe the healthy, human 
being as he is at most times instead of the 
beast which he is, occasionally. For of all 
languages and of all peoples the French can 
portray character with the keenest and the 
most subtle touch. Witness Daudet. Of his 
writings I possess all that can be bought, — 
of Guy de Maupassant and Zola, nothing. 
If such women exist in this world as some 
of those created by Maupassant, thank God! 
I have never seen them — not even in Paris. 
Anent women, he declared that he would 
never marry "because it is impossible to 
foresee what idiocy a woman may induce 
you to perpetrate " — and no man had such a 
following of the gentler sex! 

I have a few other friends in my library of 



228 A Dreamer in Paris 

modern French fiction — Georges Ohnet, 
Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrain, and Pierre Loti. 
I am willing to make room for others of 
the same class when 1 can find them. 



My exile is drawing to a termination. I 
find myself peering into the windows of 
steamship companies, and paying more at- 
tention to the chart in my hotel which is 
placed there every morning for the benefit of 
those timid ones who are waiting for a 
"smooth sea" before crossing the Channel. 
My friends talk of the beauty of summer at 
Aix-le-Bains, and try to persuade me to 
spend a month or two at that fashionable 
watering place — a certain cure for all the ills 
of the flesh. 

I feel that my complaint lies deeper than 
the waters of Aix. I am becoming morose, 
peevish, sullen, and reply to their entreaties, 
*' Are not the waters of my own country bet- 
ter, more abundant and life-giving?" They 



A Dreamer in Paris 2.2.(^ 

talk of the dangers of the sea, at this time of 
the year, and I riddle their arguments with 
facts and statistics. At night I dream of the 
mountains and glorious sunsets; of shady 
lanes and babbling trout streams; of daisies 
and tiger lilies; of goldenrod and butter- 
flies, and awake — in Paris! Seething, tu- 
multuous, restless Paris! Wicked, artificial, 
insincere Paris! 



My complaint lies deeper than the waters 
of Aix, — of Carlsbad. There is no cure for it 
this side of the Atlantic Ocean — I am home- 
sick as a schoolboy. 



I went farther than the windows of the 
steamship office to-day and procured a list of 
sailings. I must stay a whole week longer. 



leave for Philadelphia in the morning. 



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